# Felder Machines Suck



## davluri88 (Oct 21, 2007)

poor design, crummy infrastructure, won't stay true, bad service, nuts and bolts instead of tapped castings, want to hear more, I can burn your ears. things started bad and have gotten worse. take Felder delivery on a $14K machine, not counting all the 'extras' you need just to function. the guy with a germanic accent shows up at 5pm to my small shop (I told them no fork lift) with the heavy, bulky combination machine wedged into the bed of a pick-up truck. he proceeds to take the matter in hand by borrowing a 2X12 from me and attempting to slide the machine to the pavement. of course the board snaps and the machine takes a dive to the cement. then he rushes through the hook-up and leaves without truing the machine because it is 7pm and he is in the middle of a lousy divorce and could I please, please not tell his boss. so he never comes back to true the machine and neither does anyone else. I begin years of adjusting the mother and it never stays true. I wonder why. now Felder is a big help, they will talk me through any adjustments and repairs over the f'ing phone, rather that send a guy out to look at things. for example, after just a few years the gear, a small nylon piece of crap, that raises the saw motor strips out. the guy is there on the phone to help me out, oh yeah, but neglects to warn me that as I get to the bolt, the sleezy little bolt, that holds the gear on the shaft, and that has backed out because there is no engineering to prevent it from backing out and no lock-tite to cover the crappy design, that as I remove more bolts to get to the stripped gear the entire motor assembly falls to the floor. nice! so the guy says: I thought that machine had a safety bolt. thanks. So a couple weeks later, attempting to use the sliding table to crosscut some large material, I observe the table alternately rolling too high and then too low at the point that it is supported by the support beam. the eccentric BOLTS! that locate the rollers have re-eccentricized and the rollers are no longer aligned. the support beam is all over the place and so is my cut. So, I'm back on the phone with Felder and this time I'm through being guided through their work on the phone (this is the second major issue with the sliding table not staying true) and I tell him the story of the dropped machine and the repeated attempts to true the machine ever since and just general loose poorly designed BOLTS. He asks me to hold the line for ten minutes while he checks my file. He says he can't find an ongoing record of complaints on the machine and he therefore surmises that the machine has not had any issues and that Felder could not have delivered a machine in a pick-up truck because Felder would never deliver a major machine in a pick-up truck. NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED! because I did not complain (and kept fixing and adjusting the bas-----, I proved that there was nothing to complain about, or fix, or adjust. I asked to speak to another manager (I was on the line with the service dude) and she had a brilliant piece of advice: You should not have accepted the machine! (and because you did, we are not going to support it) NICE! so that's the rant. friends don't let friends buy Felder. good luck. I feel better now.


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