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Blew $700 on a hydraulic bar feeder for my old lathe, and now I'm stuck deciding if I should sell it or park it
I run a small shop in Bakersfield with two CNC lathes, and six months ago I picked up a used bar feeder for $700 thinking it would cut my load times in half on the 12 foot stock I run. Turned out my spindle bore was too small, so I had to machine an adapter, and the thing still jams on anything over 5 feet. So here's the debate I keep having with myself. Half of me says just sell it for $300 and eat the loss, because every hour I spend messing with it is an hour I'm not making chips. The other half says keep tweaking it, because a new feeder runs four grand and I'm close to getting the pusher alignment right. I've already burned two weekends and about $90 in replacement seals on this thing. What would you guys do, cut bait now or keep chasing it?
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hannah_williams11d ago
Selling it for $300 and eating a $400 loss plus two weekends of your time is not the disaster you're making it out to be. That's the cost of a lesson, and most guys in this trade have paid way more for way dumber mistakes. The real question is whether that feeder will ever work on 12 foot stock, and jamming past 5 feet says the pusher geometry is fighting the length, which is not a small tweak, that's a design problem. You could sink another month into this and still be right here. What's your shop rate? If you bill even $60 an hour, one more weekend of fiddling already costs more than the difference between selling it and keeping it. Cut bait, list it for $400 and take the first decent offer.
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