We’re based in Taiwan, don’t own a quasar, but considered buying their VMC’s, HMC’s and 5 axis offering in the last two years.
Local shops that owned recent Quasars advised me not to pick any up. Showed me some issues, the most notable is some serious finishing issues with face milling on 3 axis VMC’s. They used to be known as arguably the best local machines. A close friend who works for a big company headed a project about 8 years ago and did extensive tests between the big local MTB’s, Quasar came out on top. Recently it’s being said as the younger generation took over they replaced a lot of the old crew, and things haven’t been the same ever since.
However all of the above could be attributed to other factors and personal opinions of those I speak with. The biggest reason we didn’t buy any Quasar’s was the local dealer for us sells Quasar and Matsuura. They admitted the Quasars have many more minor issues they need to straighten out regularly, compared to the Matsuura’s that just run and keep running more or less. We ended up going Mazak for horizontal, Brothers for verticals and Mikron for 5 axis.
Have you considered the Mill E 500U with pallet pool? For us the pricing is not that far off from the MX-330 when we quoted it out, with room to negotiate if I let them tour potential customers. We ended up buying single pallet Mill E 700U show room machine thou, as the industry here is the slowest it’s ever been and the price was too good to pass up.
The Mikron has Heidenhain which is nice, machine hasn’t had any issues, service has been stellar. I had some doubts about their 1 year old show machine spindle so they simply just extended it to 18 months or 8,000 hours which ever comes first. Accuracy has been above my expectation for the RAM design that many have issues with. The Strep-Tec spindle has really impressed thus far as well.
Downsides are 60 tools is low for a pallet pool, and swapping tools outside of the machine pretty much doesn’t work at all. Loading the tools in spindle is just time consuming and out dated. When setting a fixed position tool for large tool diameters, it’s the slowest machine I’ve ever worked with. Chip to chip for those fixed tools is easily 30+ seconds for our 30 tool machine. I’d be concerned with how slow the 60 tool machine would be if the tool carousel is the same design. Makes my 20 year old YCM super max look fast. The machine also seems to ‘think’ about what it’s going to do next. A lot of odd pauses during tool changes, homing, tool breakage check, table reorientation and what not, really does add up in production. But maybe I’m just accustomed used to high production machines that ZIP about, and I should be happy picking up the Mikron for less than a Quasar of the same spec.
