My shop has an opportunity to procure, at a seemingly reasonable cost, one of these Bridgeport/Romi machhines. It is reportedly/supposedly in very good mechanical shape but has a board that comes loose and shuts the machine off while in cycle. They have decided to just replace the machine.
Does anyone out there have a MasterCAM post for a HAAS SL-20 Lathe, preferably version 9, but 10 will work as well. Or even better, does anyone have a fix for a Bridgeport EZ-PATH Romi lathe that comes up with a message: No BMDC, Desktop and then won't do anything (no jog, homing, spindle,.
It is on the order of ten years old. My questions are: How accurate and repeatable are these machines? How rugged are they? How user friendly is the control? How sophisticated is the control? Parts and service availability?
Any other first hand user experience or input would be much appreciated. The long and short with the decision to acquire comes down to this. Emoze Secure Push Mail Download more. We do not have a NC/CNC lathe at this point. Would getting this machine be 'a mediocre NC lathe is better than none at all' or are they relatively good machines for.005 or better work. We had one at work. Good iron, pretty rugged and accurate, plenty good for.005 or better, should be able to hold.001 minimum.
Control, hmmm, I didn't like it but that's probably just me, I like g-code. Screen is to small, monochrome gray scale, I used to set a 14 in color monitor on top of the cabinet, worked pretty good. You should be able to fix the board that 'comes loose', zip tie it in, use foam on the cover blah, blah, blah, be creative. They're not the fastest on the block though. Using it in manual mode takes some getting used to as there is no 'feel' when turning the handwheel, you are just turning the encoder afterall. We had a Dorian manual tool changer, I think it had 6 stations, don't recomend it, it sounds good at first but man, is it hard in your hand and wrist.
I wouldn't pay a lot for it unless it's pristine. Just my.02 Dave. Accuracy no prob for.005--wouldn't promise better than +/-.0005, though Sturdy and rugged Conversational control and very learnable--get the manuals Not a sophisticated control Unsure about parts and service--Hardinge owns Bridgeport, I think Romi is out of Brazil (I think) Fast enough and easy enough for a starter-type CNC lathe. The chuck is a lead screw chuck, but interchangeable with many types, 2-jaw, 3-jaw, 4-jaw, etc. Large enough memory to hold lots of programs and it has a floppy drive. ENDORSEMENT: I would love to have one in my garage. Good luck and have fun!
We had one where I used to work, 1998 or so model. Worked OK but I absolutely hated the control. Made me want to pull all of my hair out. Maybe not bad for production but for onesy twosey prototype work it was awful. The tailstock was a nightmare. If it was ever fully extended a key would drop inside the assembly and take 2 hours to disassemble and replace.(happened at least 4 or 5 times that I can recall) A terrible design in my opinion and as mentioned before a non-adjustable tailstock isn't such a good thing. No major mechanical probs but the controller PC (a standard 486) crapped out with about 600 hours on it.
Fixed it ourselves for not a lot of money but come on, 600 hours? It's certainly better than nothing but a pretty limited machine in my opinion.
I wouldn't go for it unless the price was very low. See if this link works. It's a link to two similar machines listed on machinetools.com If you have the operating/programming manual, programming can be learned relatively quickly. You can program regular rapid/feed moves or use the canned cycles.