With the right customers and work, the machine will cash flow it’s entire value quick, real quick, now of course most shops won’t pay one off that quick, usually go the standard 60 months.
As far as the machine operator, all of ours sit on their phones while the machines run, I’m doing it now
. But that’s on large production ( stuff we a trying to move to all automation robots/cells) right now we have to robotic cells running almost lights out 24/7. Still have some issues with chip control.. It will actually send a text message to me or two other guys here if it encounters a fault that cannot be resolved automatically. Broken tools and such are easy for the system to resolve, we just have back up tools in the magazine, it will default to using those, but misloads on the lathe pretty much always require a person to intervene.
So basically a programmer/setup guy will get a job running on the machine and hand off the keys to an operator who is responsible for running and maintaining tolerances through the whole run. Sometimes our setup/programming guys get to run the job they setup, but it’s becoming very rare with how slammed work has been lately.
Sorry for the long post, but I can talk about this stuff for days, I love it, and I’m still green there is so much capability with the new tech and equipment it’s really mind blowing and humbling to see what people are capable of doing in this field