Originally Posted by
rx8pilot
Fair enough....but in my opinion, failing to even firm up an order in a month, zero of my technical questions answered, and mysterious lead-time shows I had quite a bit of patience. I have a project that will need parts very soon. All of those parts now have to go out to local shops instead I making them in-house. That means I have to pay for 2-3 weeks of machining, make drawings, explain details, etc in addition to making a dozen trips to the shops. These are all brand new parts, so I will miss a dozen engineering issues while outside shops make them on their own schedule. Those issues would be totally obvious if I am machining them, but with an outside shop they will go unoticed for days until I can get back out there and assemble all the pieces. At that point, it will take a week to get back on the schedule to try again - from scratch. For high-volume production where a leadtime of 6-8 weeks is ok - outsourcing is how we will make parts. Most of what we do is <25 parts and the designs are constantly changing. That scenario is deadly slow and expensive.
Long story short - outsourcing is slow and expensive. If I ordered the Haas when first started looking at the Skyfire, it would be making parts by now and have $10k fewer machine shop invoices over the next 4 weeks.
If this was only a hobby, I would be patient as total cash outlay would rule the decisions. As a business, timing is another dimension altogether.