You can test an idea within a single day, that is priceless.
I agree and I don't understand why the 'experts' here can't grasp this. They might as well claim that building a test board in dead bug style is a waste of time too because you can go to a PCB house instead and get a PCB with silk screen and vias
Maybe if they spent some time in a quiet corner they might eventually realise that there is a need (for some people) to be able to do rapid prototyping that takes the technology beyond dead bug style.
This could be for a rapid fix to a problem with a production board. eg a problem is spotted and a meeting takes place and the decision is to make a little piggy bodge board to prove the concept of the 'fix'. The chap who operates the mill often designs the piggy PCB in cases like this and this speeds things up. He may well fit components to the PCB and test it in time for a technical meeting the next morning.
How are you going to compete with that using a PCB house? It just isn't going to be as quick and if the piggy board needs a tweak to the circuit (or to make it fit in a tight corner) then you lose another two days to the PCB house.
In my case I might need to have a PCB milled rapidly to test out a special RF filter. This could be a regular printed filter or something more exotic using defected grounding. ...but the benefits here are the same. With a PCB mill you can do several iterations in a single day if needed?
In theory. Wait until the drill bit gets stuck or something else goes wrong which makes the stepper miss a step. AFAIK this is where the (older/cheaper) LPKF machines fail as well.
My T-Tech machine is over 20 years old and still operates on the original mechanicals and the only way the stepper motors play up is if I have recently serviced it and the thread on the linear ways gum up with excess grease. So each time I service it I have to make sure there is not any excess grease and I also run it back and forth several times in X and Y to make sure it won't gum up.
At work our LPKF machine must have milled a lot of PCBs in the time we have had it. I would guess well into the thousands. Plus various panels and spacers and tools. I think it must be getting towards 15 years old because the CAM SW that came with it is dated 2001/2. Our first T-Tech mill was purchased by a director back in about 1992 and we bought another one a few years later. Then we upgraded to the LPKF in about 2002.
What are we doing wrong in order to get such success? Have we just been lucky for 25 years? Because according to the 'experts' here we should have thrown these machines into the skip years ago?