In reply to golfduke:
Wow, that's awesome!
They're really purchasing this as a low-cost tool to learn on/with. Once they gain experience & confidence, their intent is to upgrade to something more production-ready. They don't want to risk investing a bunch of money into something nice now, only to cause problems($$) through their own lack of experience/skill.
petegossett wrote: In reply to golfduke: Wow, that's awesome! They're really purchasing this as a low-cost tool to learn on/with. Once they gain experience & confidence, their intent is to upgrade to something more production-ready. They don't want to risk investing a bunch of money into something nice now, only to cause problems($$) through their own lack of experience/skill.
You have to be careful with that mentality, though, it's easy to get suckered into picking up someone else's problem and throw good money after bad trying to make it work "because it's cheap!" A new HAAS or some other low end machine with the same specs can be just as good for learning, cost only 3 times more but have a 75% greater uptime due to stupid problems that old machines can have (flakey switches, worn ways, etc). Plus, getting an old machine setup and working can sometimes be a big (hidden) cost on time and investment, make sure the rigger who works on it is familiar with moving that type of machine, and again, I stress getting someone in there to teach you how to run it. A lot has changed in control tech in 20 years, so imagine you have no experience with computers, and all of a sudden you have to learn DOS instead of a modern GUI, that's the situation you can end up in.
golfduke wrote: As I type this, I'm staring at a customer's Froriep 25KE VTL. 24' table, 36' Vertical travel. Made in 1942. My company retrofitted and adapted a full working 5 axis Fanuc Alpha I controls to it, as well as a full mechanical refresh and upgrade. It took a full year.
A 24 foot table and 36 feet of travel?!
Any chance you could snap some pics of the behemoth?
The biggest lathe I've seen had a 12 foot table.
I'd love to, but sadly I'm in a 'no cameras allowed' shop...
I have some pics of the table I can upload from home from some stock photos when we had it off to scrape the ways.
It's big, but it's not the biggest I've ever seen. I was down in Richmond, VA at a power generation facility that had a traditional old Pre-WW2 Ingersoll lathe with a 24' chuck and a 302' bed. 7 hydraulic custom steady's, chuck was capable of holding 50 tons static without any rests. Railroad access right inside the facility, the works... It truly was a sight... They use it to turn pump and motor turbines for Nuclear reactors.
Man, I would LOVE to see something like that!
Sorry about the hijack, Pete. 
Uh, yeah.. I'm with The_Jed.. That sounds terrifyingly awesome! (I'm a mill guy, lathes scare me! :))
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