Buying equipment is a business decision, and buying a Haas UMC is a matter of managing expectations.
Often times people will look at a UMC500 and think that it's a budget equivalent of a high end German machine, and it'll do everything the more expensive machine can do, but maybe only 75% as well. That's not really the case. A better way to look at is that the UMC will do 75% of the jobs pretty well and will flounder on the remaining 25%. This is where having other equipment in your shop can be very important because it allows you to cherry pick the jobs that you run on the UMC, so every job that runs on the UMC goes smoothly.
Disclaimer: Note that I picked the number 75% arbitrarily. YMMV.
As for the business decision, Haas is the king of resale value. We have two UMC500s purchased a year ago, and if we were to sell these machines on the used market today, we'd make money. Machine tools are meant to generate revenue by running them. Rarely are they an appreciating asset, but certain models of Haas machines are just that, and the UMC500 is one of them. Even though we have no plans to actually sell these machines, knowing their resale value provides liquidity that affects our other financial decisions. It's also nice knowing that our money is parked rather than spent, and that we're essentially renting these machines for free.
We're about to put in an order for two or three more UMC500s, in addition to a handful of VF2s - another Haas model that holds value insanely well.
