looking for used

[AlexBanich]

My company is looking for a hard turning mill. Does anybody know where you could find one relatively cheap? We just want to find a nice used one to see if we can get the work necessary to justify a new one. Thanks for any help.

[erd39030]

I bought my machines at E-bay.

[AlexBanich]

Did you wait or were you able to find right away? Any other options that you know of?

[erd39030]

I go there periodically, looking for good deals. So far it's been good (I got 11 new BT40 toolholders for only $100, for example ).

One seller that frequently get my attention is reliable tools, altough I had never bought anything from them:
http://stores.ebay.com/Reliable-Tool-Store

What's your budget and the kind of jobs you want to do?
(Cheap for me is $2,000, for some is $30,000).

Now, if you are only trying to test the market, go ahead, get some customers and I'll do the jobs for a pretty low tag (right now I'm a lazy with a lot of free time). Once you have enough customers, you buy your own machines and keep the bussiness going on.

Best regards:
Everardo

[AlexBanich]

Do you have a machine shop or do you do this on your own time? I'd imagine that the tolerances would be pretty tight within .0001 would you be capable? We are from Nothern Pennsylvania so distance would be probably the biggest factor as far as subin out.

[erd39030]

Well, perhaps I opened my big mouth too soon :-D

I do have a small shop, with older machines. So the usual tolerances I work with are in 0.001" for the machining center and 0.0005 in the turning center.

The tightly tenth you want I only get it with the flat surface grinder.

What do you need that hard mill for? Molds? Dies? Aerospace?

Nice regards:

Everardo Rascon

[AlexBanich]

We are looking to use it for dies, possibly molds if we can aquire the work, but mainly certain types of powdered metal tooling.

[AlexBanich]

What for equipment do you have and exactly where are you located?

[erd39030]

We are located at Ciudad Juárez, México.
Is in the border with El Paso, TX.

Currently what I have is a 7HP Bridgeport Interact Machining Center, with Heidenhain TNC 151control, and a 10 HP Hitachi Seiki lathe, with Fanuc 5T control.

The common jobs here are the design and fabrication of fixtures and automated workstations for the Maquiladora Industry. It involves some machining, welding, pneumatics, mechanics and digital electronics.

What I am looking for, is to focus on machining only. More specific in milling and turning by volume, leaving aside heat treatment, grinding, plating, design and other specialties that are a whole world by themselves.
Of course, bussiness are bussiness and we always are hand tied by what the market asks not by what we like to do.

I think that work with molds is fun... but I'll bet that is also stressfull, specially when talking about big/expensive tooling.
In this city the vast majoritie of those jobs are made with EDM, mostly repairs.

Cheers

Everardo

[AlexBanich]

The work that we mainly do isn't really stressful. Our EDM electrodes are turned on a CNC lathe and pretty much everything we do is based on center. I think the most stressful thing we do is some pins that we grind are only 1mm in diameter and have shoulders and tapers. Do you have/use any CNC equipment?

[erd39030]

In CNC I have (and program, and operate, and crash...) a 3 axis machining center,
and a 12 station lathe. For programming I use ESPRIT, I am learning MasterCAM, but my plans are to move to CAMWorks (SolidWorks).

[AlexBanich]

camworks is what I initially learned on when I was in school. I was the first one to learn on it and had no instructional help. It was easy to pick up. MasterCAM is what we use here. Its a little more difficult to learn but at the same time easier to get exactly what you want. What I like about SolidWorks is the fact that it has an easy simulation run through. But for that we just transfer it over to the CNCSimulator program and after a little tinkering with the tools and with stock dimensions it works great.