Dear Makers of the Openbuilds forum, Im curious what your thoughts or experience is with using your builds in a commercial production setting. There are many hobbyist here but many of the builds I have seen can be used in high volume comercial production, just curious if anyone has tried or thought about it. For a use case, consider that a CNC Lathe (from a US machinery company) can cost around 50k. And you only use if for simple operations. You need a maintenance plan, insurance, etc. It seems you can build one for around 1k that does the job quite well...but could it handle high volume production? Running 5-6 hours a day. And even if it couldn't buying/making 6 machines that can run 1 hour a day could be especially effective. What do you think?
Depending on the type of work you have in mind, it is quite feasible. My old machine used to run generally 4 to 5 hours a day. Cutting patterns for model houses and such out of ply and similar. Is that commercial usage, well it was for me. I think you can expect many CNC jobs to take 2 or more hours to run to completion, this is the limitation of "Hobby" machines, small bites, many many times. And, yes, having two or more machines are a great asset simply because of the waiting time for each job. Most definitely a case of start work on the next machine whilst waiting for the other one, but it won't reduce the job run time. Or sit and read a book and chill! What you are paying for, with the industrial/ commercial machines, is size, speed and power of cut. Gray
