The machines also monitor spindle vibration so they can tell if a tool looses an insert, and the tool-setter is used to check if solid tooling is still intact.
That's a key feature. For unattended operation, you must have good fault detection. This tends to be an overpriced extra cost option on machine tools.
There are a lot of things in industrial automation that cost more than they should. Motors with encoders, for example.
> There are a lot of things in industrial automation that cost more than they should. Motors with encoders, for example.
Not really. Motors with encoders aren't really much different in price from the alternatives at industrial sizes.
What you do see is that the transition from hobbyist machines to production machines is quite a significant price change. The jump from, say, a Tormach to a Haas is almost x10 (about $10,000 to $100,000).
This is not a surprise. Those machines are expected to run 24/7 and, if they don't, people are going to get angry and reputations come into play.
This space is optimized for production and if you're not, you're the outlier. Pre-Covid I accidentally tripped a Sunday delivery at the office from one of the machine tool suppliers--scared the hell out of me when someone knocked on my office door at 3:00PM on a Sunday. The delivery guy was just as confused--he had never delivered to such a nice office area. We both had a good chuckle about it all.
(Side anecdote: I had a really nice conversation with the late founder of Tormach many moons ago at a LittleMachineShop open house about servomotors vs steppers. He was quite blunt--the issue wasn't motor cost but customer service cost. His customer service budget would need to go up about $300K per year for about 3 years every time he introduced or changed some major machine feature. So, any change needed to earn $1M over 3 years and then be net positive after that in order to get implemented. Servomotors wouldn't pass that threshold--so unless a competitor forced him to, that upgrade wasn't happening.)
Most things I’ve found to be reasonably priced for what they are.
Most products are made with much higher quality materials than you would find in consumer gear. Also the “rated” spec for parts is expected to be understated as the “unreliable” part is one that fails in under 7-10 years of being run at the absolute limit of its spec. If a part fails in 2 years I will completely stop using that vendors products, as having a machine that is worth $1k/hr going down for even a day or two wipes out any savings.
Another factor is the total sales volume of automation products is low, so the engineering costs dominate pretty much everything in that space, even though everything is somewhat optimized to reduce engineering time (the buyers and/or vendors).
I don't think actuators are crazy overpriced really. It's true that if you are going to bother packaging them you are probably using decent-to-good quality everything, but that's what you want for non-toy projects anyway. And for toy projects if your budget is really tight no big deal to set up the encoder yourself on this one-off.
That's a key feature. For unattended operation, you must have good fault detection. This tends to be an overpriced extra cost option on machine tools.
There are a lot of things in industrial automation that cost more than they should. Motors with encoders, for example.