ROLAND 53dc vs PM5 or 7 or vhf K5+

C

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So…
Is it worth getting a automatic disc changer for the extra 30K or More?

VHF k5/A5 is a great machine I find and maybe will buy another.

But something with an auto changer is tempting. It’s a big jump to the Roland 53 but it does look like a good machine.

The PM5 or 7 looks great too but 100-120k!! Compared to 45-50k for vhf and Roland is 70-80k

Is it worth this extra money? Who has one of any of these mills who can compare or give any advice??

Is the Roland 53 a great new mill ? Would ot compare to the pm5 or pm7 ?

Thanks
 
tehnik

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Where did you get this roland price? It does not seem right. It should be in the same price range as vhf if not cheaper.
 
C

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On the AUS website it’s $70k but I suppose need to add cam?
not sure what re sellers are selling for here yet.
 
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Hard to recommend anything without more context on what you actually need from a mill / what your current and future production expectations are. For example, are you just dry milling or wet milling too, the proportion of wet/dry jobs you're running, what material and application is your bread and butter, etc. Disc changers are nice, but people tend to make poor use of them wrt productivity, imo they only really pay for themselves when they're running parts while you're kicking your heels up or 'not at work'.
Switching between dry and wet machining is a pain in the ass and is pretty inefficient to do frequently, if your volume is big enough it can become a good idea to dedicate mills to one role, and choose mills for the specific type of work and duty cycle they're best-suited to vs. having to compromise on an all-round machine.
 
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tuyere

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...and FWIW, we've had very poor experiences with VHF mills at the service level, and I've heard the same from other labs in our orbit. God help you if you need anything from VHF beyond what your vendor can provide, they have extremely poor responsiveness and enthusiasm for solving your issues and are very quick to say you're doing something wrong. Like, I've had them dig in and try to argue with us or our vendor intermediary about stuff instead of just working with you, it makes you wonder what you shelled out for. Roland is much better about this, case in point they have a rep who's reached out to me about issues on this very forum. They'll work with you to figure out whatever, beyond what they strictly 'have to' do for end users directly (vs the vendor).
 
sidesh0wb0b

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So…
Is it worth getting a automatic disc changer for the extra 30K or More?

VHF k5/A5 is a great machine I find and maybe will buy another.

But something with an auto changer is tempting. It’s a big jump to the Roland 53 but it does look like a good machine.

The PM5 or 7 looks great too but 100-120k!! Compared to 45-50k for vhf and Roland is 70-80k

Is it worth this extra money? Who has one of any of these mills who can compare or give any advice??

Is the Roland 53 a great new mill ? Would ot compare to the pm5 or pm7 ?

Thanks
youre not comparing apples to apples here though...

vhf and roland are dry mills
the pm5 and 7 are wet/dry mills
 
CoolHandLuke

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So…
Is it worth getting a automatic disc changer for the extra 30K or More?

VHF k5/A5 is a great machine I find and maybe will buy another.

But something with an auto changer is tempting. It’s a big jump to the Roland 53 but it does look like a good machine.

The PM5 or 7 looks great too but 100-120k!! Compared to 45-50k for vhf and Roland is 70-80k

Is it worth this extra money? Who has one of any of these mills who can compare or give any advice??

Is the Roland 53 a great new mill ? Would ot compare to the pm5 or pm7 ?

Thanks
where are you located?
 
TheLabGuy

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Your numbers are not correct. Furthermore, as others have stated we need to know if you are milling both wet and dry or just one or the other. As for "auto changers", YES, THEY ARE WORTH IT!!! I'm pretty solid on what I'm getting to update the new building with so I'll share. I'm going with AXSYS'S 20 disc changer (coolhandluke can tell you what model) for all my house brand zirconium and titanium and the cost was around 85k. For my e.max, Prime, and ivotion I'm purchasing the PM7, 8 disk changer for 85k. For a backup which I already have, I'll have the aidite amd-500, 12 disk changer (35k),Roland 52dci 6 disk changer (35k) and a Roland 51D. Personally I couldnt do everything I have without disk changers, my mills run continuously. I did look at VHF's R5, bad little 10 disk changers, but a little overpriced at 80k even though if I bought two of them I could get them for 65k each. Still though, axsys was much better all around. Feel free to disagree but that's where I'm at currently.
 
Affinity

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I love my vhf s2. I cant imagine ever buying another mill without a changer, the small bits of time it saves you is huge. Its almost like having an employee babysit the mill and change pucks all day. VHF should have new CAM coming out soon, the latest version is a bit dated, but you can start milling right after clicking calculate, no waiting until it finishes, which is also time waster.
 
C

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The prices are fairly correct it’s AUD not USD.

Currently specials are about

$50k -vhf k5
$90k - pm5
Roland — not sure yet.,

I know they are dry vs wet/dry but it’ll be just for DRY milling. I don’t want to mix milling and deal with that so it’s purely dry machine, I like the k5 as mentioned but a disc changer would be nice hence the pm5 …

But with that huge price difference is there any other point between a k5 and a pm5 ?

What are you getting extra when using for dry only? Is it more accurate ? Is it faster?

If the quality of restoration it mills out is the same then all I’m gaining is the disc changer for $40k more?! … nearly can buy two k5’s.

Still waiting on the Roland 53 price but yeah…

Alternatively the vhf S5 could be ok? Might end up around 65-70 AUD.? But I haven’t seen too much comments on reliability of this mill or feedback .
 
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We had nothing but trouble from our S5, it probably wasn't anything fatal but the very poor + slow support from VHF themselves on issues soured us on them. Our vendor was also frustrated with them, they haven't been working with VHF for long and hadn't had to do deep support between us and the manufacturer before, and we spent cumulatively weeks just waiting for them to get back to us or the vendor about things, or to send us replacement parts the vendor didn't stock. The machine itself seems fine, if you get a good one, but that's only half of the equation.
As also mentioned, the S5's CAM software is very crufty and archaic, nothing about it is intuitive and it's slow + awkward to use, I really wouldn't want to be using it for all my jobs.
If you're only looking at dry milling, you're also not taking advantage of a lot of the S5's capability that you're paying for, we used it with the wet milling attachment and ran imax + CoCr cases on it.
 
C

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Yeah that’s no good…
I know I wouldn’t be using its full capability but what other options are there for a good quality dry mill with disc changer?

Is the cam software in the s5 different than the k5?
 
tehnik

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Today I was visited by a Chinese reseller who used to sell Roland machines. They said, that over the years Roland milling quality will go worse, so they stopped selling them. Just something to think about. I dont know if you can tell the same about the other machines. I swapped my Rolands out for a reason.
 
millennium

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We had nothing but trouble from our S5, it probably wasn't anything fatal but the very poor + slow support from VHF themselves on issues soured us on them. Our vendor was also frustrated with them, they haven't been working with VHF for long and hadn't had to do deep support between us and the manufacturer before, and we spent cumulatively weeks just waiting for them to get back to us or the vendor about things, or to send us replacement parts the vendor didn't stock. The machine itself seems fine, if you get a good one, but that's only half of the equation.
As also mentioned, the S5's CAM software is very crufty and archaic, nothing about it is intuitive and it's slow + awkward to use, I really wouldn't want to be using it for all my jobs.
If you're only looking at dry milling, you're also not taking advantage of a lot of the S5's capability that you're paying for, we used it with the wet milling attachment and ran imax + CoCr cases on it.

I have my S5 for almost 2 years. So far no trouble, works great. The reseller is worthless but the machine is pretty good. The disk changer is definitely worth it.
 
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