There's a reddit topic with a post from 4 months ago that says they had a big layoff and "There's still 3 people trying to run and ship stuff from the US facility. The plan is for them to get absorbed in to Teknatool International", along with some posts from remaining employees. A long time ago I spent 20 years with a company (great job, flaky management) that had 3 chapter 11 bankruptcies with 2 recoveries, and know somewhat about what they must be going through. I imagine those three must be very busy right now. My last direct via eBay Teknatool order was a refurb SN2 in 2014, and from an emails search all I got was a PayPal receipt back then. I was surprised 10 years later that their ordering site didn't send the typical automatic email confirming the order. All apparently unnecessary worry, I got a ship confirmation from one of those we ship for you site and it's due here in the north woods tomorrow.
IDK how many times my tooling costs are over what I spent on lathes, as I tend to buy and rebuild older machines, but this order pushed it up another notch. What's the rule of thumb, 2x as much in tooling as the machine(s) cost?
IDK how many times my tooling costs are over what I spent on lathes, as I tend to buy and rebuild older machines, but this order pushed it up another notch. What's the rule of thumb, 2x as much in tooling as the machine(s) cost?
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. I'm active in several CNC forums, as a hobbyist but many pro machinists have hobby CNC gear. I think that's where I heard the 2x "rule". I can definitely say that I've surpassed that for both lathes and CNC stuff. We have a wound down small farm, including an older skid steer (aka sheep pooper scooper but it's way more than that). Even after having forks made in the local machine shop, only to find that I could have bought them way cheaper, the machines are ahead of the attachments.
