Future of Fadal product line

[holedpiston]

I visited Fadal's website for the first time in quite a while and was surprised by some of what I saw.

First surprise - another ownership change. Does the conventional wisdom say this is good or bad? Looks like the change is fairly recent, as the website seems to be a mish-mash of old and new. I have been personally involved in three corporate buyouts and the results were ugly every time.

Second surprise - all the vmc's have box ways now. What's up with that? I had thought that ball/roller linear ways were taking over for light-duty and "value" machines. Has there been some kind of technology advance making box ways better/faster/cheaper or something?

Third surprise - lots of Fanuc controls. Optional on most and standard on some, like those FX series machines. I have read lots of horror stories on this and other forums about that 104/d control. Could this mean that the company has decided to transition out of the control part of the business so they can focus more on the iron?

I am going to be making a buying decision in the next six months and would like to know what veterans of the industry think of all this.

Cheers,
Keith

[dertsap]

this is going back a few years
my experience with fadal was teribble ,support was worse than the machines themselves , circular interpolation was the worst ive ever seen ,the resolution was bad , ever arc had point to point flat spots , so much so that our parts shined like cut diamomds if you know what i mean , the tools were falling out of the atc while doing tool changes and the rep for fadal insisted over the phone NO IT"S NOT , took a week to get someone out to see that it was had another rep come in and try to make me feel stupid for another off and on coolant problem we were having ,all the while saying see theres no problem and laughing in my face , there were too many occasions of this to various people on our shop floor and these ignorant idiots were pushing very close to picking themselves off the floor a number of times
i would never recommend fadal period
a few places ive worked at concidered buying them and after hearing about all the trouble , bought elsewhere

i know there are guys out there that will defend fadal but they crapped on us and that is something that i won t forget

spit on them

[daking]

spit on them

And I thought Scott_bob hated Fadals!

We have two, a 1990 4020 and a 1997 3016. They have been good machines for us. We'd like to get another.

[dertsap]

suppose that sounded extreme ,i don t let go of a grudge easily

[Shizzlemah]

Some of the smaller machines still have linear ways. The bigger ones are box ways.

Spindles though, 7500RPM on the small mills and large #50s, and only 10000 on the #40 spindles? Seems that is being surpassed by many tool builders.

Another ownership change? What is the difference anymore. The old Fadal is gone... Now they are just iron with a fanuc. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, but I am not sure what they do better than any other machine tool manufacturer - although the fadal tech support is by far the best I have ever experienced.

I would have no fear buying an additional Fadal, though I wouldnt turn my nose at a 15-20k spindle with a gearbox.

[Jedi]

dertsap
the tools were falling out of the atc while doing tool changes

I had this problem happening to me too, it may have been for different reasons but my problem was that the spindle was a 1/4 inch too high to grab the tool and it was doing the tool change and just dropping it. I just had to resart the machine and with the coldstart set right. Was it a similar problem for you?

[dertsap]

no it was on going ,on and off again , broke a good number of tools by the time it was fixed
been so long i forget what was the resolution to the problem ,i think it was the dogs
one of many problems ,

you know there were some things i did like about the fadals ,the sub routines were nice , i liked being able to scroll to any portion of the program and start from that point
but between blown spindles and various other problems what really did it for me was the service here in particular, they were out right arrogant and ignorant , which is too bad concidering a company dealing in such large purchases would not care about the bread and butter ,
the customer

[DPKIF]

Originally Posted by dertsap .... circular interpolation was the worst ive ever seen ,the resolution was bad , ever arc had point to point flat spots , so much so that our parts shined like cut diamomds if you know what i mean

This can happen with the resolvers are bad in the old DC axis servo drives. Ours did that when I first got it, changed out all the resolvers and, bam, nice smooth arc cuts.

It also happens when you're running programs generated from spline curves instead of true arcs.

Originally Posted by dertsap , the tools were falling out of the atc while doing tool changes

Was this due to the tool change position (H0) being wrong? It can be adjusted (adjust the resolver) to make the tool changer line up perfectly. I had to do this when we changed our machine from BT to CAT.

I won't get into the quality of service techs, I've had both good (really good) and bad (actually crashed my machine big time and didn't tram the head in afterwards, argh...).

[ajl6549]

Get a Haas. Better yet, get a Mazak.

[dertsap]

Originally Posted by DPKIF Was this due to the tool change position (H0) being wrong? It can be adjusted (adjust the resolver) to make the tool changer line up perfectly. I had to do this when we changed our machine from BT to CAT.

i really can t say what the problem turned out to be this is going back 7 or 8 years ago

[rickyt]

We have a 4020 Fadal with Fanuc 18i-MB5, and dual-arm changer, thru spindle coolant, it runs really nice. Smooth movement and quite, you can hardly tell it's running, it is the nicest Fadal I've ran. The only odd thing is for it to do a tool change it needs the code to say M6T#. I have to change that for every tool I could change it in the post just haven't gotten to it yet.

[Neal]

Rickyt--
I suspect that your ladder is an older version. Have your ladder updated to ladder 97 and the syntax can be either M6 T# or T# M6.
Neal