This sort of thing isn't unique to tractors. Our Haas Vertical Machining Centers are great machines while, at the same time, being grotesque examples of "no us

This sort of thing isn't unique to tractors. Our Haas Vertical Machining Centers are great machines while, at the same time, being grotesque examples of "no user serviceable parts inside". This is ridiculous when you consider we have a group of electrical and software engineers with 20 to 30 years of experience in just about all aspects of technology, including real time embedded systems and robotics. In many ways we are far more qualified to support these machines than the techs they send over. I mean, we could actually design these machines from scratch. No, you can't get tech manuals. No, you can't have access to internals. Yes, there are a bunch of secret codes and you can't have them. And, yes, you will pay $1,000 (or whatever it was, I forget) for an additional 16 MEGA bytes of memory. No, we are not eager to jump into a $200K machine to fiddle with it. We are busy enough with our own work. It's about simple things. When a machine goes down for some silly reason it'd be nice to be able to diagnose and get it back up and running rather than waste a bunch of time waiting for a tech who is going to enter a few secret codes to do the same. I've seen it done a bunch of times and it is infuriating. I also do understand that the typical big iron CNC user doesn't have our profile. We are not a production shop. We have a well stocked CNC shop for prototyping product designs, just like we have pick-and-place capabilities in house. We are a product engineering firm staffed with highly experienced engineers, not a machine shop. I can see a company like Haas deciding "no way we are giving access to internals to machinist". I get it. Yet, at the same time, they have no provisions for opening the doors to more capable users. I don't even think they have a class you can take to become qualified. Perhaps the tractor industry is similar?