Small VMC's...comparing Hurco VM10i to Milltronics VM2515....which would you choose ?

Both 2017 year, side mount ATC, 10K spindles, similar condition, similar options, similar price. The Milltronics is surprisingly light (6,500 lbs).. Wondering if Hurco might have better tech support.

Hurco. I am looking for a VM10 now actually.

Local tech school teaches the Hurco controls, and several shops in the area have them, so finding people to run them in my area is easier then some other controls. Plus factory support for me is 3 hours away if needed. Thanks Jason

If you need to make round things, not the Hurco. They can't make round features for shit, even the "mold" machines with scales (I've had VMX42i machines). I had a VM10i built in 2016 that I got with a product line purchase and selling that was one of the best decisions I've made. Everything got easier to hold tolerance moving to an Okuma. The Winmax is a dumb control. The workflow is really bad relative to any other common control out there. The error checking and interrupt/restart features are nice but that is about it.

That said, I know nothing about Milltronics so the Hurco may be better here.

I've been using Milltronics for years, that said it's an old 1992 machine, so a lot of iterations behind something built in 2017. I really like the control and interface, now I never use the conversational, all g-code programming... but the machine control is logical and powerful and it's very easy to work on as it's not a bunch of proprietary components.

The factory has been fairly decent with support on my old '92 machine, better on my son's '96 and I imagine would be great one something as new as 2017.

Hurco owns Milltronics. So as far as support goes they should be about the same. Which control do you like better?

Rick Finsta said:

If you need to make round things, not the Hurco. They can't make round features for shit,

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I thought "round things" were for lathe work.... do you mean inside and outside curves and in what detail are the "features for shit" ??

Milacron said:

I thought "round things" were for lathe work.... do you mean inside and outside curves and in what detail are the "features for shit" ??

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Interpolated holes and bosses. I have one product in particular that is a register plate for a tool that puts o'ring grooves into engine blocks and cylinder heads. The tool itself has a tight tolerance OD that is certainly turned, but I interpolate the plate. The old owner of the product line was never able to make them fit - he had a few where he would bore them instead and then just dumped the product. It only needs to hold about 0.0005" out of round and cylindricity for a 4" bore (my current machine holds less than half that all day with no fuss) but the Hurco VM10i just would not do it. Sure, it could be done with a boring head but it has a few other features in the hole that need to be milled; it isn't just round.

Even with the VMX machines we had trouble with things like large threadmilling jobs and such, where trying to get the thread into tolerance all the way around was a pain in the ass. Pin fits were difficult, etc. We ended up having to ream on a few jobs.

Don't get me wrong I would take another Hurco over something like a Haas any day, but as I said the workflow on the control does not make much sense (the way you set offsets, tool lengths, height and diameter compensation, etc. are in dumb places, and loading and unloading tools from the machine has about the dumbest workflow I've ever seen). They are capable of good speed and the accel/decel is well tuned. They make good parts, and the control is certainly a step up CAPABILITY wise over other budget machines, but they have a few little idiosyncrasies.

We had some phrases in the old shop: "Because Brother," "Because Hurco," "Because FANUC," etc. They were used when someone asked "why are you doing it THAT way?"

Rick Finsta said:

...but as I said the workflow on the control does not make much sense (the way you set offsets, tool lengths, height and diameter compensation, etc. are in dumb places, and loading and unloading tools from the machine has about the dumbest workflow I've ever seen).

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I am curious about why you came to have this opinion...

To my mind, tool management on Winmax is superior in terms of ease of use and streamlined workflow to anything else I've used, however there are a number of different ways of doing it and navigating around the control while doing it.

It makes me wonder if you perhaps were not shown the most streamlined methods of doing that stuff.

There are plenty of things I don't like about our Hurcos, but tool/offset management is definitely not one of them...

As far as the iron goes, they are what they are, Taiwanese frames with the kind of quality control that comes with that. Maybe you got unlucky.

I have three Hurcos currently, a 2010 VMX64 50T, a 2011 DCX32 50T, and an ancient 1992 BMC25.

The VMX64 is the only one that I really care about accuracy, but it has no issues with interpolating round features. A lot of what comes off that machine goes on the CMM, so I have some decent data for that one.

The BMC25 is well worn and gets no quarter, but even that one will (perhaps marginally) interpolate a hole to 5 tenths. I did relent and give it new thrust bearings a few years ago so I guess that helps...

FWIW, I am not a Hurco fanboy, and am pretty much sworn off them for future purchases. Just not for the reasons you've stated.

Not sure what to say, we had four of the VMX42is and now they have added at least four more since I left. We had issues on all of them. That was after one of the arrived with a bad ballscrew, one with bad way covers, and one with a bad spindle. We would routinely see huge compensation numbers from the scale feedback, like they built a cheap machine and then tried to use the scales to make up for it. They also moved around a lot over the course of a day as the coolant got warmer - thermal stability was very poor. Never had issues with the Brothers or Matsuura in the same environment.

I know I'm not one to cheerlead for institutional inertia, but most machine tools have things in relatively the same place, or things are done in a certain way. The Winmax was so different from normal workflow (Fanuc, Brother, Mits, Siemens, Okuma are what I've seen/used) that every time you walked up you had to remember how it worked. Sure on a Fanuc you sometimes forget to switch modes, or on a C00 you sit there and stare at "Cancel with Saving" because you really want to "Save and Exit" but the general workflow is the same. Having to fiddle fuck around by entering tools as Manual and then having to go into a different place and switch them to Auto... maybe you're right and I was taught a dumb way to do it but we were taught by the applications guys, and we hired a guy that had been running Winmax controls since their inception, so...? I haven't touched a C00 in about 20 months (holy shit is that right? Uggghh math checks out), but I know I could walk up, load a program, touch off tools, and run parts. I haven't run Swiss in two years, but I could walk up and run a 32i with minimal trouble. I would really struggle to use a Hurco after about 13 months of selling my last one.

As I said earlier, I think that it is a very capable control and the accel/decel and motion is much better than a Haas. I like the interrupt and restart, and I really liked the error checking feature as well. It doesn't care about program size, etc.

Rick Finsta said:

Having to fiddle fuck around by entering tools as Manual and then having to go into a different place and switch them to Auto... maybe you're right and I was taught a dumb way to do it but we were taught by the applications guys, and we hired a guy that had been running Winmax controls since their inception, so...?

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Yeah, no wonder you didn't like it...

Winmax tool setting process, go to tool setup and enter a number you want the tool to be, press tool change auto and start and it prompts you to load the tool, press tool change auto again and it changes it to an auto tool. Probe or measure the tool offset or type it in if you measured it offline. Repeat with the next one. Don't ever have to leave the tool setup screen. It's extremely fluent.

Actually that sounds familiar. If you used it every day it wasn't bad, it was just different. If you were like me and going back and forth between 3-axis/4-axis VMCs, the 5-axis, turning, and Swiss, then it was different enough that I would have to constantly use the help function. When I moved to my own shop I was using the VM10i for the product line where the tools don't change, so if I did anything with special tools I also would forget in between.

That is another good part - a calculator and help function/ manual built in to the control. I seem to recall it could remember offsets for a lot of tools not in the magazine. That was nice - keep the tools set up and then just figure out how to load them. I also don't like machines that require you load tools through the spindle. I prefer to load tools while the spindle is running.

It also had a nice warmup cycle, and machine park function.

Chip evacuation is a complete joke, and they put the conveyor down in a coolant trough RIGHT WHERE YOU WILL DROP THINGS in between the door and the table. The chip auger on the VM10i was really dad for aluminum fines and plugged up causing overflows if you didn't pull the auger apart and clean under the screen once a month. The VMX42i machines had the same idiotic auger and then fed the most plug-prone, worst-draining lift-up conveyors I have ever seen.

If you buy a Hurco, buy a shovel.

Again, I know I might come off as shitting all over these machines, but having had a broad exposure to a lot of middle to high quality machine tools in a brief period of time, I've got plenty of gripes about most of them. I just hope that maybe something I point out can help someone see something they otherwise wouldn't have, so they can weight their options most effectively.

Rick Finsta said:

Actually that sounds familiar. If you used it every day it wasn't bad, it was just different. If you were like me and going back and forth between 3-axis/4-axis VMCs, the 5-axis, turning, and Swiss, then it was different enough that I would have to constantly use the help function. When I moved to my own shop I was using the VM10i for the product line where the tools don't change, so if I did anything with special tools I also would forget in between.

That is another good part - a calculator and help function/ manual built in to the control. I seem to recall it could remember offsets for a lot of tools not in the magazine. That was nice - keep the tools set up and then just figure out how to load them. I also don't like machines that require you load tools through the spindle. I prefer to load tools while the spindle is running.

It also had a nice warmup cycle, and machine park function.

Chip evacuation is a complete joke, and they put the conveyor down in a coolant trough RIGHT WHERE YOU WILL DROP THINGS in between the door and the table. The chip auger on the VM10i was really dad for aluminum fines and plugged up causing overflows if you didn't pull the auger apart and clean under the screen once a month. The VMX42i machines had the same idiotic auger and then fed the most plug-prone, worst-draining lift-up conveyors I have ever seen.

If you buy a Hurco, buy a shovel.

Again, I know I might come off as shitting all over these machines, but having had a broad exposure to a lot of middle to high quality machine tools in a brief period of time, I've got plenty of gripes about most of them. I just hope that maybe something I point out can help someone see something they otherwise wouldn't have, so they can weight their options most effectively.

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For whatever reason I have no problems constantly moving between different controls. I have never cared about having similar controls on all the machines, so there is variety and for the most part I have no issue going between them.

What does get me, constantly and infuriatingly, are the stupid little differences between all the Fanucs, trying to remember which ones clear what when you hit reset and suchlike. Super annoying.

We bought a dmg mori 5 axis millturn last year, and the Celos control caused me a fair amount of frustration in the beginning but I have a pretty good handle on it now. That control has a ton of nice features, but it does like to make simple things difficult, like setting up tools...

I wholeheartedly agree that getting chips out of the enclosure is a pain on the Hurcos, the washdown is pretty awful on both of ours and the enclosure design is not well thought out for chip removal. However both of ours have drum filter conveyers, so once the chips are actually in the conveyer the problems pretty much end there. Our VMX did have a flat screen filter that the inner conveyer discharged coolant into and it was a nuisance for clogging, but I reworked the whole thing so that all of the coolant out of the machine goes through the drum filter, and that fixed that. I don't know why it was not like that from the factory. I guess they just didn't have an alternative tank layout that was specifically designed for the drum filter option...

No augers on our VMX, just a discharge conveyer under the table feeding a scraper type lift conveyor, but the DCX has two huge augers either side of the table that are capable of discharging way more chips into the lift conveyer than it can handle, so for sure jams are not uncommon on that machine when it's working hard.

Originally the lift conveyor motor on the DCX had a really weak clutch, and it took very little to jam it and start the clutch slipping, of course the augers kept on going until the operator noticed. When that happened you needed a shovel alright...

I remedied that also by throwing the original motor-gearbox in the skip and putting a better quality unit on there. Again, should have come from the factory with a more suitable unit fitted.

Things like those are the reasons why I will most likely not buy another Hurco, not because of the control or the performance.

Duh, yeah on the VMX machines there was no auger it was just the conveyor running full-length submerged between the door and the table.

I also had no complaints about how close that table gets to the door on either the VMX42i or the VM10i. Accessibility was good. The motion range of the control unit was good for setups.

I didn't like the brushes instead of a door on the tool carousel. The tool magazine would get absolutely filled with chips and it was a bit of a pain to clean. We ripped out a lot of bristles on one job where a drill was getting wrapped up in long stringy chips (we just could not get that thing to break a chip and this was after I had been transitioned out of leadership so I couldn't just order the right drill).

As to the machine tool builder implementation on the FANUCS... yeah. I don't disagree. Some implementation was really good and some just wasn't. At least the basics are the same of having modes, screens, hard and soft keys where everything is in basically the same place. I would love to see the Doosan iHMI overlay to see if a budget machine tool builder has that figured out. Matsuura's was really, really good, and the new Robodrills with the iHMI was also very good.

One thing I'll say is I think the on-control programming on the Winmax is oversold. The reason we even put them on our floor was the principals' old business (a huge tool and die and injection molding business) had a lot of luck getting apprentices working independently on them very quickly versus FANUC, Mits, etc. I think it had a lot more to do with the fact that it is an actual modern UI design and folks my age and younger (I'm around 40) are used to well-designed user interfaces. We bought the STP import, and some other programming features, and one guy went to classes and used it once to cut some tutorial parts, and then none of it was ever used again. Modern workflow in many shops is using a smaller number of programmers using CAD/CAM to feed a larger number of setup/operators.

It does have some nice "use it like a Bridgeport" features as well, if I didn't mention that earlier. It was really easy to do things like square up a few side of a piece of stock before running the program out of CAM.