Used cnc lathes for secondary operations

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In this day and age of global competition in the metalworking and machining industry, all manufacturing organizations look to find every possible method in trying to reduce costs and increasing profitability. One of the areas in which cost reductions are eagerly sought after is in capital equipment spending and many machining houses are accomplishing this by opting to purchase used cnc lathes in place of new cnc lathes. Used cnc lathes obviously provide immediate relief in capital equipment costs and these savings in costs can reflect a healthy improvement in bottom line profitability. However, there is another area where the purchase and employment of a used cnc lathe can help in increasing profitability. And that is the situation wherein a used cnc lathe can be used strictly as a station to perform secondary operations on parts.

Secondary operations such as drilled holes at the end opposite the nose or front end of the workpiece, drilling and tapping operations on the tail end, back turning, back side male thread turning and such that are sometimes needed on parts can take a long amount of production time and you do not need to tie up more expensive and high speed cnc lathes to accomplish these. Such secondary operations can be relegated to a low cost used cnc lathe that does not need to be a high speed machine. Additionally, performing these secondary operations on a low cost cnc lathe reduces the per piece production cost on the part from the low cost machining station.

Secondary operations on used cnc lathes lend themselves to be performed by lower pay level and lower skilled operators, relieving the higher skilled operators to perform production on higher cost new cnc lathes and such. Secondary operations on used cnc lathes are performed by a lot of machine shops nowadays in pursuit of reducing the capital expense burden that gets amortized into the part piece price.