CNC lathe or CNC Mill your biggest money maker

At the end of the day IMO the Milling Machine is always going to be the prominent cash cow for most machines. Why? Complexity. You can make some pretty complex parts on a standard lathe, sure. But in any component the actual complexity is going to come down to the milled features. Milling is just infinitely more complex a process than turning. This is the reason why B axis head lathes with live tooling and a Y axis are so popular! Things like the Mazak Integrex and Doosan Puma are huge money makers for a lot of companies because you can do one-shot machining without operator handling.

5-axis mills may or may not make a company money. Probably a lot of companies who bought into the 5-axis hype have lost a ton of money because they don't know how to harness them. They can be cash cows too! You have to have parts for them and you need to optimize them.

To the flip side, many company's back bone or bread and butter dollars come from large batch lathe runs. Let's see...if you have a medium size turning center with a Y axis, live tooling and a bar feeder, and the parts that are suited to that, that thing just prints money. Day in day out, it prints money! If the process is dialed in, it prints money! This allows a company to take risks on machines like 5-axis or maybe a 4 axis horizontal. Maybe they get some aerospace contracts...those machines are financed through the bread and butter parts that that lathe cell is pushing out.

We have amortized our capital equipment costs across the spectrum. What I mean is that we have one single flat shop rate of $100/hour. Cheap parts are more expensive and expensive parts are cheaper on the whole with us. It is the same price if you need some crazy 5 axis stuff done, or if you just need simple turned parts made. It certainly helps us maintain consistency and the customers don't seem to mind. Some parts might cost more than another shop can do them for, but then some other parts might be a lot cheaper than another shop can do. Our complex 5-axis work is cheaper than our competitors for that reason.