Mark Ross
07-12-2012, 4:56 PM
She arrived today, we placed her next to her 6 year old brother whose has two nickanmes... lucky and old smokey. Lucky has had several small fires over the years. We have always caught them in time. She sure is purty, all sparkly and new...Old smoky, he don't "breathe" so well all the time any more, we have to keep scraping his lung pipes. He sure is getting ugly as he ages, he takes after his poppa.
All kidding aside though, we have bought a brand new 36EXT to go next to our 6 year old 36 ext. The Pros?
1. Same machine, commonality of service parts. Less in house tech training to troubleshoot / repair.
2. Same user interfaces, no new operator training.
3. Pretty good mean time between failure and the MTBF would be even better if I had time to do a silly little thing called "preventative maintenance".
4. We are in the USA, never more than a day away from a needed repair part.
5. USA based tech support, we don't call and get "Thank you for calling, dis is peggy..."
6. Unpacked, installed, and up and running in less than one hour.
7. No surprises. A well designed machine that has really great packing. No surprises uncrating it.
The Cons?
1. Way more expensive than a Chinese laser.
2. Now I have two machine to take care of.
I don't know how the economy is for everyone else, but we just became a right to work state this year and we have almost doubled the number of full time factory employees. Our sales on all our products (lasers are just a very small part of what we do) are way way up. This 36 EXT is a 75 watter, old smoky is a lowly 45W. Based on our estimates right out of the shoot, baby girl is already booked at 65% capacity 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. We ran the numbers all sorts of ways and it just made more fiscal sense to buy a second machine than add a second shift for laser work only.
All kidding aside though, we have bought a brand new 36EXT to go next to our 6 year old 36 ext. The Pros?
1. Same machine, commonality of service parts. Less in house tech training to troubleshoot / repair.
2. Same user interfaces, no new operator training.
3. Pretty good mean time between failure and the MTBF would be even better if I had time to do a silly little thing called "preventative maintenance".
4. We are in the USA, never more than a day away from a needed repair part.
5. USA based tech support, we don't call and get "Thank you for calling, dis is peggy..."
6. Unpacked, installed, and up and running in less than one hour.
7. No surprises. A well designed machine that has really great packing. No surprises uncrating it.
The Cons?
1. Way more expensive than a Chinese laser.
2. Now I have two machine to take care of.
I don't know how the economy is for everyone else, but we just became a right to work state this year and we have almost doubled the number of full time factory employees. Our sales on all our products (lasers are just a very small part of what we do) are way way up. This 36 EXT is a 75 watter, old smoky is a lowly 45W. Based on our estimates right out of the shoot, baby girl is already booked at 65% capacity 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. We ran the numbers all sorts of ways and it just made more fiscal sense to buy a second machine than add a second shift for laser work only.