>>106843974
Not sure if bait, but I'll give you a real answer regardless.
Why would you upgrade something that's working and has worked for 20 years?
A large 5-7 axis CnC machine costs many millions of dollars, potentially well into the 10s of millions. You don't just replace something like that. You retrofit whenever possible because wholesale replacement is financial suicide.
The trouble is, even retrofits are expensive. You have to remember that a lot of this equipment is designed to be running all the time. Even if you assume that a retrofit goes perfectly (which it won't), a week's worth of downtime may require you to go through and completely service components. For example: emulsified coolant solutions had time to settle when they weren't being recirculated at least once every day or two. Water vapor might have condensed inside of some high pressure grease assembly, and that means you'll need to disassemble something that requires taking out a portion of a wall wall so you can bring a modular crane assembly in to lift a cast iron block the size of a sedan just to make sure that you won't get rust buildups in 6 months requiring a 7 figure repair with a 4 month lead time.
This isn't just applicable to the machine your working on. If you have an assembly line of stuff and do a major retrofit on a key component, you can't just leave all the other stuff running. Maybe you can do small runs of stuff and designate a portion of a loading dock to store stuff...assuming you aren't working with perishables like food, but even that isn't ideal. It's often not even the thing you're trying to renovate that causes the most headaches. It's some other random thing that gets angry if it's left off for 3 days, and then you have to bribe some old fuck to come in out of retirement to spend 2 days recalibrating it because nobody else really knows how, and it'd take 2 months to figure it out.
>cont.
