Wire EDM recommendations
My shop has a 25-year-old Makino and that's about it for my wire EDM experience. It sits for months at a time so usually when we need it for a one-off it becomes an exercise in cleaning and tuning to get it to thread. I would not be confident using it for a production job. Additionally, the head has been crashed more than once so it would need some expensive parts & service to be operational.
We have a new application coming up that will require production wire work. The parts are very small so we would run a gang-up fixture with many parts. The machine would need to be able to reliably rethread the wire. From what I hear, technology is greatly improved in this area, but again I have very little experience with wire. Tolerances on this specific part are not very tight (+/- .002") but we do occasionally size dowel holes in hard material to +/- .0001" so it would be more useful if it could do this.
I have started looking into purchasing a wire EDM and I wondered what people who actually spend time with them think. I have heard Mitsubishi, Sodick, and FANUC all make nice ones. What do you guys recommend for something to do many small parts overnight?