If you have purchased a new automobile recently, it may well have been equipped with a CD system, power steering and a sun roof as standard equipment. Manufacturers these days also provide owners 50,000 mile bumper-to-bumper warranties, plus 100,000 miles between tune-ups in the maintenance package. Then there are the dealer incentives. Such is life in the highly competitive auto industry.  It's not all that different with machine tools. But better yet, you'll find even more extraordinary value being offered to U.S. machine shops in their investment opportunities for today's low-cost CNC machines—in particular, horizontal lathes and vertical machining centers, which represent from 65 to 70 percent of the U.S. market in terms of units consumed. Thanks to a stable economy over the past half decade, pricing for basic machine tools has remained flat. At the same time, there has been little letup in adding new technology to most product lines. The industry's extended boom has quietly masked the bargains available today in the so-called low-end category of machine tools.  For some people who've been around machine tools for a while, the term "low end" may conjure up old ideas of inferior imports, slow speed and really basic CNC's. And no doubt, some of that equipment from the late 1970s and early '80s was like an auto without power brakes, or an engineering department without CAD/CAM. These were cheap machines without "much shine" but for the low initial cost. But today's smart buyer has grown to expect more technology as a matter of course. He buys a car with all the do-dads, why not his machine tools? And successful builders are responding simply because the market demands it. 
 

Technology Bar Raised 

Today's robust economy and the rise in the use of computerization in the design, engineering, inspection and controlling of new products has greatly quickened the development and introduction of new CNC machines into the marketplace. Whether one attends a regional trade show or waits for the biennial IMTS exhibition, there's much fanfare to digest over the wide selection of new equipment. 

Buckley Owens Machinery Corp. 6416 Fly Road | East Syracuse, New York 13057 Telephone 315.432.0708 Fax 315.432.0736 Email: info@buckleyowens.com