We have a 2011 530C that we bought for ~$67,000 from Machinery Systems Illinois, a company that does service directly for Mazak in South Eastern Wisconsin from their locations in Illinois, or Brookfield, Wisconsin, and we've had pretty constant tool change issues with that machine.
It appears it was sold to us with at least one known problem, but possibly as many as 4 known problems (~18 tool pot tabs missing, a bad spindle motor, and a faulty tool changer, and a Renishaw RTS that won't communicate after the Mach Sys field setup work). The tool pots were supplied, but took about 3-4 weeks to arrive because they didn't have 18 pots in the USA, and we installed those ourselves so they cost us up time to install.
Service techs have been very hard to get on any of these issues. We wasted 8 days of our lead programmer who gets paid about $65 an hour here working with it, because he was the only guy experienced enough to work on it, and because we couldn't get a service tech in faster than 2 weeks. We aligned the 2 alignment conditions and the home position. We would improve a condition, attempt to run, throw a tool, and return to work on the machine, so that process cost the 8 days before we realized everything we can do is done, and it is still throwing tools- it's looking like this is a mechanical issue possibly with the draw bar collet for the pull studs. We also bought that machine with a spindle noise that turned out to be a bad spindle motor bearing (the spindle cartridge was a new rebuild, so they had been servicing it and should have known about the motor needing replacement also at point of sale on account of being familiar with the sound of their equipment). We also were told of a 2 week lead time for the motor install, so we purchased and installed that internally. We lost some time figuring out how to get the spindle probe to hold calibration- that was a small issue. We never got the RTS functional for touching tools. We've got about a documented 3 weeks of time we've sporadically put into service on the machine and it's not fixed. These issues have cumulatively caused about 7-10 weeks of lost time on a machine we need running 20 hours a day 5 days a week. That's almost a full lost quarter of a year of production. This wasn't at all our expectation when we purchased the machine. This has gotten to the point we could have bought a brand new Doosan with equal or better capabilities for $120K, and reclaimed the difference with money lost to down time. That strikes me like theft. I didn't sign up to be robbed of my time.
The emergency service call we put in today is resulting in a scheduled Monday visit so we're losing 4 business days and 80 hours of operation on it if they can fix that the same day.
My local Ellison dealer for Doosan will have service guys on site in anywhere from 2 hours to three days- the dumb part of that is that Doosan machines don't really seem to break down- or at least not in any substantial way to even need them to come out so it's exceedingly rare we ever need them, but when we do, they are very fast to put machines back up here.
This is essentially just a report of our experience with Mazak in South Eastern Wisconsin. The machine isn't running right yet, and that's unfortunate. I know every situation is somewhat different depending on how the customer is valued by the company, age of the equipment, etc. However I never would have expected this out of a 2011 machine thats being sold by the people who service it in this region for MAZAK corporate.
For the Mazak users in this region what are your experiences? For the customers of Machinery Systems, what are your experiences?
It appears it was sold to us with at least one known problem, but possibly as many as 4 known problems (~18 tool pot tabs missing, a bad spindle motor, and a faulty tool changer, and a Renishaw RTS that won't communicate after the Mach Sys field setup work). The tool pots were supplied, but took about 3-4 weeks to arrive because they didn't have 18 pots in the USA, and we installed those ourselves so they cost us up time to install.
Service techs have been very hard to get on any of these issues. We wasted 8 days of our lead programmer who gets paid about $65 an hour here working with it, because he was the only guy experienced enough to work on it, and because we couldn't get a service tech in faster than 2 weeks. We aligned the 2 alignment conditions and the home position. We would improve a condition, attempt to run, throw a tool, and return to work on the machine, so that process cost the 8 days before we realized everything we can do is done, and it is still throwing tools- it's looking like this is a mechanical issue possibly with the draw bar collet for the pull studs. We also bought that machine with a spindle noise that turned out to be a bad spindle motor bearing (the spindle cartridge was a new rebuild, so they had been servicing it and should have known about the motor needing replacement also at point of sale on account of being familiar with the sound of their equipment). We also were told of a 2 week lead time for the motor install, so we purchased and installed that internally. We lost some time figuring out how to get the spindle probe to hold calibration- that was a small issue. We never got the RTS functional for touching tools. We've got about a documented 3 weeks of time we've sporadically put into service on the machine and it's not fixed. These issues have cumulatively caused about 7-10 weeks of lost time on a machine we need running 20 hours a day 5 days a week. That's almost a full lost quarter of a year of production. This wasn't at all our expectation when we purchased the machine. This has gotten to the point we could have bought a brand new Doosan with equal or better capabilities for $120K, and reclaimed the difference with money lost to down time. That strikes me like theft. I didn't sign up to be robbed of my time.
The emergency service call we put in today is resulting in a scheduled Monday visit so we're losing 4 business days and 80 hours of operation on it if they can fix that the same day.
My local Ellison dealer for Doosan will have service guys on site in anywhere from 2 hours to three days- the dumb part of that is that Doosan machines don't really seem to break down- or at least not in any substantial way to even need them to come out so it's exceedingly rare we ever need them, but when we do, they are very fast to put machines back up here.
This is essentially just a report of our experience with Mazak in South Eastern Wisconsin. The machine isn't running right yet, and that's unfortunate. I know every situation is somewhat different depending on how the customer is valued by the company, age of the equipment, etc. However I never would have expected this out of a 2011 machine thats being sold by the people who service it in this region for MAZAK corporate.
For the Mazak users in this region what are your experiences? For the customers of Machinery Systems, what are your experiences?