Anybody Using Grizzly Industrial? My Experience

[Ironken]

I am the first to bash a company for poor customer service. In fairness, I should also praise a company for good customer service. I ordered a Grizzly G0695 knee mill. It arrived at the shipping terminal destroyed. Broken hand wheels and the head rotated due to being knocked over. One call to Grizzly and 2 days later, my replacement machine showed up.......not too bad!
I went to their Springfield, Mo showroom and picked up a small swivel head bandsaw, a G9742. The hydraulic feed cylinder leaked bad! One email later and 4 days, I had a replacement in hand. I understand these are Taiwanese or Chinese machines but, they will serve my purpose.
Anybody else here using Grizzly equipment? Sorry guys....can't get the pics to rotate correctly.

[ryanjones2150]

I've used them off and on over the years for a few items and have always been pleased. My neighbor has a whole bunch of their tree carcass working machines and he loves the machines and dealing with the grizzly folks. <br />
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I'm in the market for a better metal lathe and will most likely buy it from them if I get a new one for the service reason. <br />
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And pretty much everything new in the sizes of your machines there are imported these days. No way around that as I understand it.

[Ironken]

"Tree carcass working," now thats funny. There's only one thing I hate more than working with wood......painting!

It's sad but, you are correct. For the home gamer, imports are all thats available. What's even more crazy is that Taiwanese machines have become the higher quality and more desirable equipment as opposed to other imports.

This lathe that you speak of. What model do you have in mind? I'm looking at a G4003g.

[old jupiter]

I would trust Grizzly a whole lot farther than any other importer of cut-rate tools for the simple reason that the president of the company is a man who can run and use any of his company's products, and seems to have a serious appreciation of good craftsmanship. I expect this extends to having good inspection procedures in place both in Receiving and at the factories . . . which I imagine are more often in Taiwan, which has been making some good machinery for years, rather than mainland China.

Still, these tools are not American or European or Japanese, and caveat emptor should be our watchwords. A friend of mine, an auto machinist with many decades experience, drove up to Bellingham a couple of years ago, which I believe is Grizzly's corporate HQ. He talked to one of their tech experts about a particular gap-bed lathe. Now, you guys have all heard (and I know from having bought a Taiwanese knee-mill thirty-five years ago) that with Chinese tools the FIRST thing to do when you get one home is to completely disassemble it, knock out the remaining core-sand, and hand-deburr and lube everything before re-assembly and first use. In fact, you maybe should mike and dial-indicate everything, to see if they actually got the sand out of the multi-part assemblies before they did final machining, because you might just want to return the tool. Well, when asked about the particular lathe, the tech expert at Grizzly quietly said he would stand behind the machine . . . unless you took the gap-bed out and then put it back, in which case all bets were off.

That answer might be different by now. But my buddy waited until he could find a good deal on an old Logan lathe, and is very happy with his decision. My own lathe, a big heavy 16X40 Goodway, was built in Taiwan, but by one of their best, most experienced industrial machine tool manufacturers (they now specialize in CNC and robotics). And my little old knee-mill has gone away, replaced by a 2J Bridgeport,

[Ironken]

I would trust Grizzly a whole lot farther than any other importer of cut-rate tools for the simple reason that the president of the company is a man who can run and use any of his company's products, and seems to have a serious appreciation of good craftsmanship. I expect this extends to having good inspection procedures in place both in Receiving and at the factories . . . which I imagine are more often in Taiwan, which has been making some good machinery for years, rather than mainland China.

Still, these tools are not American or European or Japanese, and caveat emptor should be our watchwords. A friend of mine, an auto machinist with many decades experience, drove up to Bellingham a couple of years ago, which I believe is Grizzly's corporate HQ. He talked to one of their tech experts about a particular gap-bed lathe. Now, you guys have all heard (and I know from having bought a Taiwanese knee-mill thirty-five years ago) that with Chinese tools the FIRST thing to do when you get one home is to completely disassemble it, knock out the remaining core-sand, and hand-deburr and lube everything before re-assembly and first use. In fact, you maybe should mike and dial-indicate everything, to see if they actually got the sand out of the multi-part assemblies before they did final machining, because you might just want to return the tool. Well, when asked about the particular lathe, the tech expert at Grizzly quietly said he would stand behind the machine . . . unless you took the gap-bed out and then put it back, in which case all bets were off.

That answer might be different by now. But my buddy waited until he could find a good deal on an old Logan lathe, and is very happy with his decision. My own lathe, a big heavy 16X40 Goodway, was built in Taiwan, but by one of their best, most experienced industrial machine tool manufacturers (they now specialize in CNC and robotics). And my little old knee-mill has gone away, replaced by a 2J Bridgeport,

I agree with you Jupiter. Ordering equipment from some big company that just sells equipment as opposed to buying from a company where the owner has his hands in the mix and can actually use his product does make a difference. That's not to say that companies like Miller don't do a great job as far as customer support. A great customer support structure is not the standard anymore.

I'm going to plagerize a post I read some time ago......where, I don't remember. The poster said he , "buys import machinery as if it were a kit needing adjustment and proper assembly to function correctly." Keeping that in mind he said he was never disappointed. This lines up with what you are saying and I agree.

The ideal situation would to do as you did and buy high quality used American or high end import machines. Size is an issue for me, leaving Grizzly as a good choice. If you ever find yourself tired of that Bridgeport, I will be happy to give it a good home. I'll knock the ceiling out to make it fit if need be and use my Grizzly for a boat anchor.

[ryanjones2150]

I like the looks of that g4003g lathe, but for that money, I'll buy an old south bend or something. Mostly because I like old crap. I was looking at the smaller ones from grizzly actually. But I'm pretty sure grizzly owns south bend nowadays.

[Ironken]

Ryan, I believe you are correct. Grizzly owns Southbend and has the brand produced in Taiwan for them. They sell them at a VERY premium price. Way more than I feel a Taiwanese piece of equipment is worth. I was also interested in their Grizzly branded smaller machines but, they only feed/thread to the left. I have a ways to go before I pull the trigger on one. I just bought my wifey a heat treating furnace.....um......I mean a glass kiln. Sooooo, I gotta build the 'ol savings back up.

[Andrew J 649]

On old jupiter's comment regarding Logan, I was searching these parts (nyc) for years and finally found a seller of an 820 10". Its such a nice machine. Over fifty years old and runs great. But on the grizzly topic itself, I've only owned one and i can't say it was a bad experience. I needed a 20" thickness planer for a job a few years back building a wine shop here in new york. I put about 3000 board feet of white oak through a used grizzly G1033 and it held up well and produced a decent surface. I got through the job and about a year later sold it. From one end of the cutter head to the other across 19" or so of knife there was about .015" of difference that i could not tune out of the beast (cutter head to table relationship/parallelism). Not the end of the world for woodworking, but it did bother me. Now I've got an even older Delta Invicta dc 33 and am happy with it. It too has problems but all in all a noticeably better design.