[Rotax91]

The Haas sales rep stopped last week. Basically when you build a quote online, that is your price. The list price of each specific add on is this price you pay. They had a tiny discount for first time Haas person. Then a bundling discount for adding some options together. Was disappointed that there wasn't more buying incentive. This is nothing like buying a car. With a car, you never pay sticker price. It is what it is but you know the prices are substantially inflated they want $1695 for 750mb of memory and $1595 for an ethernet interface. Hope my dad swings towards the used route rather than new.

[Geof]

You say " you know the prices are substantially inflated they want $1695 for 750mb of memory ... but to some extent this is not the case. The base price is for a minimalist machine which can allow someone with restricted finances to get into CNC at a minimal cost. Do you really need an ehternet interface? Do you really need 750mb of memory. I have a couple of dozen, or more, Haas machine and none of them have ethernet and none have more than 1mb of memor; and collectively they have earned millions of dollars for me. If you (your father I guess) are just getting into CNC do you really need ethernet, do you really need oodles of memory? What kind of work will the machine do?

When I got into CNC 15 years ago I had an established product line and my first CNC machine was a lathe that greatly simplified the primary process for making our product; parting off aliminum round bar into pucks that then were further machined in milling machines. The CNC machine also improved efficiency on a few parts that were done in the lathe. Within 6 months the efficiency introduced by a single CNC lathe generated the free cash to buy a VF0 milling machine and things cascaded from there such that in a few years I had something like 27 machines. During this time our output went up approximately 20 fold while the number of employees went up two fold.

Could I have done this had my company been a small jobbing shop? Probably not. And I would never have taken the risk of financing a fancy fully optioned machine on the speculation it would have been a money spinner. But I might have considered somethign bare bones to get me started.