The question is labor cost. I rebuild for cheap cause I pay myself
nothing. Real easy to spend 200+ hours on something like this. If you
paid somebody 15-20 an hour, it could easy go over $10K. There's a
reason industry just scraps an old machine.

Karl, as you know, I trust and respect you, but I wonder why a rebuild
should involve 200 hours, if good equipment is available. I thought that
it is abous indicating and grinding the bed and cross slide, building
up with epoxy, and reassembling everything. I can see how it could
take a long time in the absence of a proper grinder etc. But would it
be time consuming to do myself. I personally would never undertake
such a project personally.

I wanted to say ", but it would be time consuming to do myself".

I can only speak for myself. I've done a 10EE, a Hardinge CHNC, a
Mazak M4, an Excello 602, and I'm in the middle of a Matsuura
1000-VDC.

The huge time part is do to never having done that exact unit before,
and broken ****. There's a huge learning curve on this stuff. You end
up calling everywhere and/or fabricating items. For me, there is also
the Midas syndrome. While its apart you midas well to this, you midas
well do that, yada, yada.

My current project is in a different field, but the rule is holding.
I'm going to have 100 hours into rebuilding a Browning 1919
machinegun. I'm doing a second one, with all parts on hand this time,
and should knock it out in 15 hours. I got 1/2 way yesterday.

Karl