Hi Justin,
Just to give you the benefit of my experience of the early hurco. I can relate very much to what you are saying and there are some big inherent problems with them at this age of control.
They are notoriously bad if they have been left standing for any period of time especially if in a cold and damp environment. It was common you would have to power them up several times to get any action out of the machine to get it to load the master. Those machines need to be left powered up 24/7. If they are not, and left to get cold and damp you will have a hand full of problems, which will most likely prove very expensive to put right. (i learnt this the hard way) Even with a tape emulator they are still a hand full of trouble
One main problem is the age of this machine and yes they are from the early 80s. what happens is the components on the boards break down with age and give no end of trouble, as soon as you fix one problem with a very expensive board then no sooner do you have another problem. In the case of England a board was typically £700 a shot and even then they were repaired boards and not new replacements.
The bottom line of this was for me personally it was so expensive to keep running and getting it to boot up. Even if it was left on nearly 9 times out of ten i would go back to the works to find the thing had shut down over the weekend and then all the normal problems of trying to get it to boot again as it had got cold and damp. It was pretty much a very expensive learning curve. In the end due to it being so unreliable i had it retrofitted with an anilam 3000 series control full three axis control. Although anilam have some very weird programing ideas it did the job and made the machine usable again.
Now in the defence of the hurco i will say the reason why i retrofitted the machine as apposed to buying another good second hand machine was the carcase of those models of hurcos are Spanish(and not american) They are very very good machine carcases accurate and well built. Also in its defence the actual control of those models is excellent (when working of course) easy to program line to line is as easy as you can get canned cycles loop and repeats so easy to program and nested many times. This is what i loved about the hurco was it ease to use. which is something i can not say about the retrofit i had done IE the anilam! If i could afford a modern hurco in the current uk manufacturing climate( which is dead) i would not hesitation at all buying one as they are in my view very simply one of the best out there for ease of use with conversational control.
To sum this up the version of hurco it seems you are looking at has this small tool changer on it, with this in mind it is most likely a machine with a speed controlled head also. If this is the case beware! if it goes wrong which it may at that age it will cost you a small fortune to put right. They also did a model with a manualy controlled head, which i have for the reason that if it goes wrong its cheap and easy to repair and you can do it yourself! A big advantage!
If i were you although i totally love the hurcos from that age i would avoid it like the plague. You will have nothing but trouble and a lot of expense! The amount you will end up spending to keep it running will be a lot better spent on a newer machine, where control parts are more readily available and a lot cheaper than the hurcos! In the end hurco uk stopped offering any support for these machine controls. so this totally null and voided the machine as usable machine tool with the original control.
This is just my experience. I hope it helps you make a decision. Please remember this is my experience only and i cant speak for the situation in the USA with spares and prices etc
Kind regards,
Scott  |