Haas CNC Control – What’s Improved and What Still Works

Haas CNC Control – Still Some Clever Ideas After All These Years

I first started training people on the Haas CNC control back in 1995, and at the time it was an absolute game changer.

Not quite in the same way as when I first saw Mazatrol, the Mazak conversational software, which was stunning to say the least. Haas impressed me for different reasons.

What Haas effectively did was take the familiar Fanuc-style control and put it on steroids. A very clever move.

Editing was miles better. Copy and paste — wow! Programs were easy to copy, and program restart was, and in my opinion still is, one of the best systems around. Compare that with Fanuc, where restarting a program can still feel unnecessarily painful.

On a Haas, you could move the cursor to where you wanted in the program and hit Cycle Start. Simple.

And then there were the little things.

When an axis reached the end of its travel, it just stopped. No alarm-induced panic, no turning on the smoke alarms or sprinkler system. It just plain old stopped.

I’m also pretty sure Haas were one of the first to fit a coolant wash-down hose as standard. Ostensibly this was for cleaning down the machine, although its more important use was soaking your unsuspecting mate on the machine next door.

It even had a tray for your coffee cup and a clip for the airline. Someone had clearly spent time using the machine tools Gene Haas I think.

Tool changing was easy too. No M6 T1 followed by an end-of-block. Just input T1 and press ATC Forward.

Fanuc, meanwhile, can seemingly find a way of punishing you for forgetting an EOB.

Has the Haas CNC Control Lost Some of That Innovation?

All that said, I can’t help thinking that some of that original innovative approach became a little jaded over the years.

However, I recently worked on a very new VF-2 and noticed a few rather clever features that I really liked. I don’t know how long some of these have been available, but they certainly caught my attention.