Down East Fabrication Upgrades Their KOMO VR 512 CNC Router

Confidently making the most out of the machines you already have can save you time and money. Down East Fabrication faced a challenge with their old FANUC controller. Instead of replacing their entire CNC router, they chose to optimize it, achieving better results at only a fraction of the cost.

Down East Fabrication Video Transcription

My name is Dennis Seibert. I’m president of Down East Fabrication. Down East Fabrication is a company that fabricates countertops – granite, corian, and quartz. Our machine was old, antiquated and I was looking you know I had guys coming in here all the time trying to sell me new equipment um and I’m you know seeing all these brand new controls but the machine itself hadn’t changed in 20 years. I mean what else can you do with a a table that’s cutting wood, corian, and that sort of material. So I didn’t really want to spend the money to to replace a piece of equipment that was working fine but I still wanted to update it. Started doing some internet research and that’s when I came across MachMotion. Machine itself mechanically was running great. Bearings were in good shape. The only issue that we had was the electronics just were outdated. Needed updating, so reached out to MachMotion. They replaced all of the servo motors , the XYZ motors, and all of the controls. Added a new computer control station. Well, I was having troubles the day I bought the company to be honest. The screen was going out, I mean it was running Windows 95, you know antiquated software. We could run Windows 10 on it. We can hook our ERP software up to it, where our guy can see a schedule for the day right at the machine. He can access all his files. Operators love using it! You know, some of our installers get back early, we’ve taught them how to use it. The onboarding process to to learn how to use that piece of equipment is about an hour to two hours.

If you’re an older person like myself, I’m pushing 50 years old, we grew up – we we didn’t have computers. I didn’t grow up around computers, so I was afraid of computers. I just didn’t know how to work them. If you’re in that age group, you’d literally be a fool not to get this because it’s that easy. It really is that easy to learn this and an hour of training, an hour of training, that was it, and I wasn’t left with a manual to have to look at to look at things. It’s four buttons, four buttons to run it. I mean now to change a bit, it’s two buttons. So what’s it doing right now? It’s going to go down it’s going to hit that little button it’ll go down it’ll touch it it’ll come up a little bit and then touch it again very lightly and that acts your spoil it measures it off the spoil board underneath of your your cut piece.

I’m AJ I work at Down East Fabrication. I’m one of the programmers here. Before we had the MachMotion integration with the KOMO, we weren’t able to use Alphacam. We had to use Router Sim. It’s a plugin or add-on to AutoCAD. There’s nothing wrong with our machine, everything ran great so we decided to save a bunch of money and go with the MachMotion control and it’s probably been the best decision for that machine. I like the confidence knowing that if something goes down it’s replaceable. I would absolutely recommend this upgrade I mean it’s going to add another 20 years to your the life of your machine. Our machine’s 20 years old now and if we get another 20 years out of it that would be amazing. It’s the best ROI that you can ask for. I’d recommend it. Just do it.

E.F. San Juan Upgrades Their C.R. Onsrud CNC Router

Optimizing the machines you already own can yield significant time and cost savings. When E.F. San Juan encountered issues with their old OSAI controller, they opted for optimization over replacement.

E.F. San Juan Video Transcription

My name is Eddie San Juan and I’m the backend operations manager at E.F. San Juan Incorporated. We’re a custom molding and millwork manufacturing company. We make doors, exterior, interior, windows pretty much any product made out of wood. We had a aging Onsrud CNC so um it was with an OSAI controller and really started to, not necessarily go down completely, but when it would get cold it would start to not start up. Extended periods of time where we’d have to start it five, six, seven, eight, times and we started to get nervous. We ordered a new controller, not something that was currently made so everything you were buying was refurbished. We got our sent to us and it wasn’t programmed. Shipped it off multiple times, had to even sent it to Italy to OSAI to actually do some reprogramming. Got to us again and it still this was like a six-month process, and when we finally got that one back and it didn’t work I realized this could have been us down for 6 months and that’s when I immediately started looking for somebody that could placed the processor. Found MachMotion and then started pursuing it. So I didn’t have a time where the machine actually was down and we were totally incapacitated and waiting but it was more of a preemptive measure.

For where this was real convenient for me uh to release a tool manually. A lot of times we had to get a second person to come in and catch it for us. We’ve been very strict on our maintenance of our routers over the years so I knew that physically all of the nuts and bolts of our routers were in pristine shape and could still hold the tolerances that we needed. The only thing that was aging about our routers was the controller, the servos, and the electrical kind of heart of the machine. It’s definitely a huge fear in any you know owner or management type scenario where you’ve got a machine that is a huge revenue producer for your company and being down for 6 months, it’s hard to even estimate what the opportunity cost would have been, let alone just the cost of having a machine not producing the parts. From programming it helps speeds things up makes, it a little more efficient. A lot of it was just going through with the postprocessor outputting to where they can see things easier. Everything works great. They can actually look through the program and see this part of the program does this, and this part the program does this, and actually communicate better between us and operators. The way you can actually just switch to the next tool that you want. We used to have to delete code out and that put us in a bind of deleted something that was needed you crash machine and now you can just skip to the next tool that you’re actually wanting to use.

The machine was operating you know and starting to do the calibration within 3 days, I believe, and then the next Monday we were running parts again. It was a one week downtime and that’s what we planned for and it was executed. If you’ve got a machine that you’ve taken good care of and you are even a little bit paranoid about its ability to start up, its ability to get parts, its ability to get anything about the the computer system within your router, I think one of these upgrades is a no-brainer. I mean, generally the cost is a fraction of what it takes to buy a brand new one let alone the lead time it takes to get a brand new one. So all in all I’d say it’s better than I ever could have imagined it went. You know it’s a very complicated thing. I’m blown away by the experience really. I’d recommend to anybody that that has a machine that’s that’s applicable and compatible with what you guys do.