NUMBER 02 - Haas Automation, Inc.

In-House Production,
In-House Versatility
In 1997, Karlheinz Nicolai moved his family and his
business to the sprawling farm in the country that both
continue to call home.
“I’d always admired this house,” he says. “So when the
owner passed away and the family decided to put it on the
market, we moved in.”
Finally, the young firm had space in which to operate
and grow. And grow it did. Having begun with older, used
machines, Nicolai knew that long-term success lay with
investing in modern, state-of-the-art machinery and
software. In 1999, the company purchased a new CNC
machine, which gave rise to “an explosion of productivity.”
Nicolai was on its way.
| www.HaasCNC.com
In 2005, when Karlheinz Nicolai went looking for a
vertical machining centre, he turned to a friend for advice.
“He’d been successfully running a Haas VF vertical
machining centre for the last 10 years without any trouble, so
I decided to check out the Haas machines,” notes Karlheinz.
“We had a strict budget with which to purchase not just
the machine, but all the new SK40 tooling we would need to
get started. It quickly became apparent that the Haas VF-2SS
was the ideal machine for our applications. There’s nothing on
the market that compares with it for price and performance:
a relatively compact machine that can machine small and
larger parts at high speed. We needed a 12,000-rpm spindle,
because we machine a lot of aluminium. We got all this and
more with the VF-2SS, and remained within our budget. Even
though we financed the machine over several years, it really
paid for itself in the first few months.”