Need a new machine. should I go with 1 fast one or 2 slower ones?

[Harry Radaza]

hi all. I have a Universal Versalaer VL300 50 watt machine. have had it for 2 months and seen the need for a second and third machine. We offer our services (which runs into 500+ to thousands per order) and also our products at the mall (personalized wood plaques) which dont run into the thousands but give me a consistent daily order.

I shopped around and settled on GCC Laserpro. here in the philippines they are offering the Mercury 25 watts at $19,150 and the Explorer 30 watts at $28,301. Seeing both in action swayed me to the explorer. It was SUPER fast and has a much bigger work area (18"x36"?).

The dealer offered me 50% down and 1 year to pay no interest on both machines. Am I better off with 1 Fast Explorer (which is good for the high volume orders) or 2 Mercury's (in about a years time I'd be able to be a second mercury) which isn't as fast as the explorer but will give me more specific jobs to handle at any given time.

Really stuck here. Sometimes I get large volume orders sometimes I get orders that aren't so large but will require time with different machines.

By the way, I have nothing against Universal. They have been great with me, after sales and everything was perfect. The GCC just came out cheaper with all the add ons (free blower, installation on site, piping, air assist, cutting table, air compressor)

Will be making the purchase by next week so hopefully you guys can help me out with this one!

[Rodne Gold]

I have more or less been there and done that , we are getting 3 spirits to compliment our 3 explorers and did upgrade from mercuries to explorers some time ago (2.5 yrs)
I rarely use the full table size of the explorer so imho , the size thing isnt a huge issue and in terms of cutting , both the explorer and 25 w mercury are more or less on par speed wise. The Explorers are faster on engraving , I would not however say they are fully double and it depends on what you engrave as to how much faster, they look a lot faster than they actually are if you time a mercury and an explorer job. The mercuries are real reliable workhorses and the explorers are more a thoroughbred and can be a little finicky. As I say , we are now going for 3 25w spirits rather than a single more potent larger machine as in my experience , having multiple slower machines is better than a single high po one. I would rather have the peace of mind that if one machine goes down , I have backups capable of producing then no production at all. If you have a single machine and a long run , yes , you might get it done faster , but you have NO production facilites for any other jobs that come along , so in essence you put ALL your eggs in one basket machine AND customer wise!!

I also had the option of going for mercuries rather than spirits for these 3 new machines and the price diff between the newer and faster spirit (the devil we don't know) and the mercuries (the devil we know)was not a lot of money
I went with the newer technology and obviously "improved" machine , the spirit.
I would also consider your workflow , all our machines are one type and all with more or less the same power , meaning that any job can be sent with the same settings to all machines and be run on any of them.
With different makes of machines ,you are going to have to send 2 diff files and use your design package differently with the probability of having to decide which machine runs what job. Thus switching resources is that much more difficult.
I would not and didn't switch brands when going multiple machines for this very reason. Why not ask your exisiting machine supplier to try match pricing , in the longer term it might not have paid to pay less for a different machine due to essentially running 2 setups which are not compatible.
Apart from all this , we have also found that some experimentation and optimising of hardware/lasering strategy can speed things up SUBSTANTIALLY , we had a huge order for engraved flexibrass lables and cut cycle times down from 1 minute to 18 seconds a label by fiddling with speeds , dpi , ppi , optimising alignment , optimising sorting , optimising layup, using vectors in place of rasters (for borders) and so forth. We took a teeny hit in engraving quality , but only me who is a little anal about quality really noticed it. Not only that , we distributed the same job amongst 3 machines and all gave us the same results , there might have been a consistency issue had we used 2 different makes of machine to do this job.

[Harry Radaza]

Rodne,

thank you so much for all the suggestions. I never thought of it that way. How much did you get your mercury?