I’m the one who originally Tweeted about the Practical Machinists thread last night, the one that evidently inspired Cory to write this post.
I find his take on it extremely sensationalistic however.
1- There is zero evidence that DMG/Mori Seiki uses the ITAR interlocks as some sort of a “business opportunity.” In fact, they don’t even install the interlocks on their US built CNC machines destined for use in the US marketplace. Only the Japanese and German built machines have the ITAR interlock.
2- I’ve yet to see a single report of the ITAR interlock being used to enforce the terms of a financing deal. In fact, since the interlock requires machine movement to trip, I don’t see how it would be an effective tool to that end. Furthermore, DMG/Mori is not in the financing business; that’s between the bank and the machine owner. Given that I’m in the market (eventual) for a nice CNC mill that will be financed, I would love to see a link to Cory’s evidence of such!
3- The notion that the CNC mill interlock is somehow indicative of the machine being “closed” and “obscured” to the point where it could somehow be infected with a virus to make defective parts is patently absurd. Such a virus would need to know the details of the G-code program being used to cut the part well enough to know what functions could be fudged without obvious detection. Furthermore, any life-safety or mission-critical component ever made goes through numerous inspections after it comes off a CNC mill. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, is taking parts spit fresh out of a CNC center and slapping them into life-safety stuff without numerous and highly documented quality inspections performed off the machine.
More importantly, CNC machines on par with something from DMG/Mori are not purchased by clueless consumers. While DMG/Mori machine are at the top of the class in precision, repeatability and speed, the market isn’t graded on a bell curve. There is significant competition in this class of tool from the likes of Makino, Okuma, Fanuc, Brother, Citizen, Tornos… Technology has even allowed some of the second tier machine makers to start reliably churning out extremely high precision levels that once required buying super high-end gear (Mazak, Haas VM-SS class mills). Machinists are damn near OSS/Linux levels of crotchety and paranoid; if DMG/Mori was using the ITAR interlock to push people around, they would lose marketshare near instantly.
In the end, I think the ITAR interlocks are an interesting feature. It is absolutely something worthy of chewing on with discussion. The amount of unsubstantiated sensationalism Cory presents in this post though, really strains credulity. In fact, it makes me question just how accurate and reasoned the rest of his body of work is now that I’ve squared his hyperbole up with a subject I know something about.
