Ken,
What kind of a machine are you looking for? What price range and capability?
The first machine I bought was a Milltronics with a centurion VI control. The control is a PC based system. I've had it now for six years and have had realatively few problems with it. The control is wonderful, it has many canned cycles like circular pocket clear & finish...Rectangular pocket clear & finish, circular & rectangular frame milling, parametric programming, nested subroutines, helical milling, even tapered wall pockets and some. The great part is it came with a floppy drive to put programs into the machine. I have since taken out the floppy and installed a Zip drive thus eliminating DNC cables. I also added a hard drive (2 gig) I now DNC right from the hard drive or if I want to, the Zip drive. I make a lot of aircraft parts and molds on this machine and it is capable of more than I even know. The best part is that it is easy to work on, all American parts. Many parts I can get locally and don't have to go to the machine builder to buy them. I installed the Zip drive and hard drive myself, cost me under $50 plus a little time and a little tech support.
I have also owned two Chiron machining centers with Fanuc controls. Anything you need to upgrade on these controls will cost you dearly. I needed a new I/O board for one, $3000.00, They have limited memory and as far as I know no hard drive or Zip capabilities. These machines were Geman made, hard to get parts for and hard to work on.
Also I owned a Mazak with a 640M fusion control. It had the floppy and I was also able to install a compact flash interface in this one myself, also I networked it with my office PC allowing me to just move a program directly to the control in my office instantly. This machine used a PC base to run a Mitsubishi control (very simular to Fanuc)
Out of all these machines I like the ease of use of the Centurion VI control on the Milltronics the best. If you haven't looked at one, take the time to do so. Best of luck.
Ken  |