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Okuma GENOS L2000 is overkill for NPT job

common Joe

Plastic
Joined
May 7, 2013
Location
Lemont, IL
My company is buying an Okuma GENOS L2000 lathe for threading exterior 1/2 NPT threads in mild steel. We machine 1000's of these in a small family of parts. There has to either be a cheaper machine brand name, or better manufacturing strategy than this.

Okuma is a heavy duty, close tolerance machine. Bulk threading easy material with $100k+ in equipment is egregious overkill. Any alternative cheaper lathes? Should I just go with thread rolling?
 
They're a socket. 1" dia x 2" oal. Electronics in the cup end and NPT's on the "male" end.They come with a blank cylinder that we turn down and single point thread. Just seems like so much investment in eq. for that.
 
It's possible some one up the food chain has other plans for the machine besides these parts and is using this project to justify the purchase. I've never regretted having more capability, especially when it's not my dime.
It's possible too that somebody's brother in law is the okuma rep...

But if I got to pick anything to make these parts (out side of a rotary transfer machine because we're talking 1000's not 1,000,000's) it would be a just big enough bar fed gang tool lathe something like this https://www.hardinge.com/product/turning/talent-series-gt/ but still admittedly over kill these could also easily be done on a small haas lathe.

Look at it this way the okuma will likely last the rest of your career, knock out all the needed parts needed for a month in a week and then you get the rest of the month to use it on other projects .
 
Are you hoping to use the money for something else elsewhere? I'd take the machine then run other jobs on it. Maybe you could show them how well it's working then buy an older used Okuma to take over that repeat job. An Okuma Heritage ESL-6 would handle that no problem and you can find them for around 20K in pretty decent shape. The ESL is very compact. Without a conveyor they are only about 6 feet long and you can get later models with the OSP-200 control so you get the windows interface and all but unlimited memory.
 
Thanks guys.

I'm gonna look into some Proto Trak controlled lathes. Were never going to run anything else except these families of parts, so I'm gonna dumb down the technology. Happy days gentlemen.
 
Wouldn't go that route, I'd make sure what ever you do had auto loading of stock and unloading of parts and a chip conveyor. Would make no sense to save $50k on the one time purchase of the machine only to spend that every year on an operator to load, unload and shovel the chips.
 
My company is buying an Okuma GENOS L2000 lathe for threading exterior 1/2 NPT threads in mild steel. We machine 1000's of these in a small family of parts. There has to either be a cheaper machine brand name, or better manufacturing strategy than this.

Okuma is a heavy duty, close tolerance machine. Bulk threading easy material with $100k+ in equipment is egregious overkill. Any alternative cheaper lathes? Should I just go with thread rolling?
They can pick the same machine up from an auction for 1/2 that price.
Now if you said they were buying an LB instead of a genos, then I would agree that it is way overkill.
Does this Genos have a parts catcher and bar feeder?
 








 
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