The Wildest Machines We Saw At TMTS 2026 ｜ Machine Shop Talk Ep.152

What is Taiwan manufacturing doing differently? What is the secret sauce that's creating incredible leaps forward in machining technology while also managing to compete on a global stage? What makes this vibrant, small island nation able to maintain its position at the forefront of global technology? In search of answers, we traveled to Taichung, Taiwan. Taichung is Taiwan's second largest city, clocking in at 2.8 million people, with a density of around 1,200 people per square kilometer. It's also one of the fastest growing cities, with much of that growth directly attributable to the manufacturing industry, which is something you don't commonly find in the West. This is the birthplace of the Taiwanese manufacturing sector. With a strong emphasis on manufacturing coming out in the 1950s, this area has grown to hold over 70% of Taiwan's machine tooling companies. To put a finger on the pulse of this manufacturing powerhouse, we traveled to TMTS 2026, the Taiwan International Machine Tools Show, put on by the Taiwan Machine Builders Association, or TMBA, and their partners. With over 1,800 booths and an estimated 70,000 attendees, some of the wildest machinery Taiwan has to offer was on display. And to begin, here are the top things that caught my eye at TMTS 2026. So this machine here is something that's very specialized for Taiwan. When you think Taiwan, what do you think of? Semiconductors. This machine is like something I've never seen before, and if you look in there, that's actually a silicon carbide wafer that they use for semiconductor manufacturing. Now, what this is, it's kind of like a sink EDM or an EDM drill, but they call it an EDM mill. So what that's doing is it uses a tiny, tiny wire to go in and essentially put these tiny little holes into that wafer. That wafer is, I believe, 10 millimeters thick, and they used to do it with drills when they did this kind of process. What's crazy is one of those used to take 15 days to machine. With this process, they're doing them in half an hour. This is the kind of stuff that you probably won't see at other trade shows around the world because it's very specialized for the Taiwan market. But there's tons of stuff like this here that I've just never seen before. Now, one thing that's cool about this as well, if you look, you can see that tiny little electrode in there. What happens is that's a consumable. It's much like a wire EDM that once it gets burnt, it does wear out. But that container up on the top there actually contains another 32 wires. Now, because of that, when that thing runs out and it tool changes, it can tool change additional canisters of those wires on there. So this thing can actually run for days or even weeks in some cases, completely unattended. The last thing I want to point out about this machine is if you look, kind of like those phone booth style machines that I have, this has nothing on either side. It's completely square. The reason they do that is the chip fabs around here, they don't have one of these. They have 10, 15, 20 of them all in a row. And then they have automation to go and reload them all. So you're getting like true lights out manufacturing. This is what sets that Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing apart from anything else in the world. These are some of the coolest machines that I've found at the show two years running. They're small footprint, but they have some really, really crazy features that you don't see on other machines. Every machine here has the thermal stability. So it has automatic thermal comp in every machine. That's not an option. That comes standard on all of them. They are loaded with a lot of premium features that you would typically only find on a machine that's worth three times the price. And I've seen these things do some crazy heavy cuts. They stand up to them absolutely all day. I think these are one of the hidden gems coming out of Taiwan that not enough people know about and not enough people are talking about. This setup behind me is really cool. So this is a 5-axis trunnion. I haven't seen a lot of setups like this before. So not only are you getting a really cool machine, this is something that I had actually never seen. So I'm learning something while I'm taking a peek at it. On the left here, you can see the first operation where it's starting with its raw stock. So that's doing its setup, putting in the dovetail, getting it ready to go over to the 5-axis pipe. In the center, you can see where that's actually got the full 5-axis capability. So it's got the A-drive in there as well. Then on the third off, you can see that's where it's decking off the excess material. Really cool setup, real world, something I haven't seen. So this is the Terra 40V. This is the one I saw doing some crazy fast cutting last time. This thing's going at 20,000 millimeters per minute. It's about 784 inches per minute. It comes with a 15,000 rpm spindle. And you can see this is one of the craziest live cutting demos I've seen anywhere. This is probably the best example of live cutting going on at the show. I can't walk by it without stopping and taking a peek. Now, the reason why these are so interesting to me is this kind of breaks the conception that I might have had a couple of years ago about what a Taiwan machine is. You know, you associate it with lower cost, so you think lower performance. This is the best example I've ever seen of how that's 100% not the case. Now, this one's really cool. This is a leadwell. So you probably know them. I know some guys who have leadwells. This is something I haven't seen before. So not only is this pinch turning right now. So pinch turning, you know, is when you're turning both sides of the part at once. The top head is actually the live spindle or the five axis head. So I've seen it with two static turrets doing it before. This is the first time I've ever seen a live turning head doing that kind of pinch milling. The cool part about that is you could obviously switch that tool out, be turning on one side and milling on the other if you really wanted. It looks like there's also driven tool holders below. So a lot of cool stuff you can do with it. Another cool thing about this machine, which I haven't seen, is on the bottom there on that bottom turret. You can see there's actually a work support there. So what that means is if you're doing heavy milling on the top or even turning with that top head, instead of using a turning tool on the bottom, you can actually rotate that up to support it. So that bottom turret now turns into a work support that moves along with it. Very, very cool stuff. There's a lot of ingenuity that goes into some stuff I'm seeing here that kind of gives you a little bit of an inspiration and an idea of new stuff to do. Now this machine blew my mind. This is like something I've never seen before. So if you know me, you know that we have made in the past tooling for multi-spindle machines like the Hydromats, where it has a lot of rotating parts with workstations. This one is a four-station rotary, kind of like a rotary transfer. So up at the top here, it has two loading spindles. So it's got two forward-facing chucks. And the bottom here is where it's actually doing the machining. So it's machining two parts simultaneously. But what makes it really cool is to pretty much make it have zero downtime. You can see it rotates like that. So it'll machine two parts, rotate so it's reloading while the other two are still running. And I'm told what makes this machine even more unique is since there are two sides of this, the controller can actually run two separate programs at the same time. So you can be doing program A on the left, program B on the right. It doesn't matter. And since it's got these two robots up top, it can keep that thing reloading for the ultimate lights out manufacturing. What's also really cool is those look like little chucks. They can actually do up to 150 millimeter diameter part size. So you can actually do some fairly large work in this. This is how companies over here are managing to compete on an international level because they're getting so much efficiency out of their machines. This one was brand new for me. Another cool machine we found is this giant horizontal pallet changing mill. This is a Femco. One of the cool things you see here in Taiwan that you maybe don't see as often in other places, a lot of the machines here are built for ultimate utilitarian purpose. So they don't have guarding where they don't need guarding. They don't have covers for no reason. A lot of them are kind of stripped down to this really Spartan, we want to get stuff done at a price that makes sense standpoint. You can see this giant machine behind me. It's got the two pallets. You can see how high that head in the column is. Because of that, you can tell this can handle some really, really tall parts and also some very, very heavy parts. We got to see this one pallet change yesterday, which it's doing right now. And you can see just how much power is underneath that table to be able to bring that out there. This is something that again, I've seen big horizontal mills, but this is kind of that special flavor that makes Taiwan manufacturing sand out a little bit. So you can see here, we've got the tool changer on the left hand side. You can see it's got a fairly large magazine. It looks like it takes cat 50 tool holders. And you can see when it's moving in here, that thing has an absolutely massive range of motion. Here you can see it's going to go simulate doing an internal boring operation. You can see that head is actually turning off center. So that spindle can actually move a certain degree. So if you're doing line boring or any kind of horizontal boring, you can expand that and offset it as much as you want. It's a pretty cool workaround for that mill turn experience on what essentially is a giant horizontal mill. Now, one thing you see a lot of here, because semiconductor and electronics manufacturing is such a huge industry here. A lot of these machines are really driven towards doing tiny, tiny parts. You can see that drill in there. I think it's about 10,000 most diameter. That thing is designed to put those tiny little IC holes in for test plates for components, for computers, quantum computers, silicon chip manufacturing. They do it here so well because they build the machines to do it like nobody else. If it was such a huge industry where you are, it makes perfect sense. There's a lot of this really specialized equipment here. Now this machine caught my eye. This thing's crazy. This is a YCM GX85. This is a full five axis milling center. And yes, the table is huge. The machine is super capable. But what's really cool that I haven't seen elsewhere is everybody talks about AI. It's a massive buzzword right now. Everybody's trying to fit it in where it makes sense. This is actually one of the first cases where I've actually seen that make sense. Everybody knows about conversational program. You can talk to the machine and it makes you a program. These actually have a conversational AI. I can voice activate things in the controller while I'm doing something in the machine. I can call up programs. I can tell it to change tools. It's something I haven't seen before. And I think we're going to see more and more of this as the years go on with all the AI software as it matures, getting integrated into the machines. And that's a big theme here at YCM. From data collection on your machine, spindle uptime, predictive maintenance. So it'll tell you how often based on what you're doing in the machine, you should be changing things as opposed to a standard which may not apply to you. It's the kind of stuff we're going to see happening more and more. And I think it's interesting, even if it's still a maturing field. So to piggyback on that AI concept here, that's a huge theme of the show. How do they integrate this kind of machine learning into machining? It sounds like it should be simple, but finding in a way where it's a real practical use case is obviously what everybody's trying to solve. Here at YCM, they've definitely found some integrations that actually make sense for job shops and production shops. From shop floor reporting, so it will pull everything your machine is doing, put it in a spreadsheet and allow you to analyze it so you can see where your improvements can be made. All the way to digital twin technology, so you can optimize all your programs offline before they even touch a machine. So you're not wasting time not making chips. All the way to the smart programming. So this is that AI enabled augmented programming in order to make the machine more efficient because the program is more efficient. As time goes on, this is where I think we're going to see a real fit for AI when it comes to machining. And it's cool to see the forefront of that here really on display at YCM. Now one thing that is unique to Taiwan trade shows, you'll see these giant sands of flowers everywhere. What they are is it's a well-wish and a good luck charm that they kind of give to each other, whether it's vendors, buyers, and you can tell by the more flowers there are at a booth, the more well-wishers they have. And here at eTech, you might know them as SuperTech in the US, they are probably the booth with the most flowers here. And of course, they make locally made grinders right here in Taiwan. The one thing I kept noticing again and again here was that every company here producing in Taiwan had one goal in mind. Team Taiwan. Everyone here is pulling in the same direction. Not just talking about the success of their own individual companies, as much as furthering the national industry and continuing to put Taiwan on the map. I think we are working very hard and we have teamwork. We have teamwork concept and we love to learn each other. So we think we can work together to help other customers to have a better solution. Because everyone has their own strengths that we need to work together. Taichung is very close, high density in the machine, in the high-precision machine. And this is the birthplace of Taiwanese machining. Not only that it's on a super high level, but for me, it's affordable, right? I think we both come from the job shop world. And, you know, people keep stacking and as you stack up technologies and as you actually create these monster machines, they actually cost a lot of money. They do. And in America, like America, Canada, right? But it's like we need to get the prices down on the tools that we buy so we can actually quote competitively in a global market and stuff. So I think for us, we want to make sure that we have a beginning solution for starting a shop. So anyone can start a shop and have kind of like that mid-range, you know, that kind of 80% range right there. And I think YCM actually pops right in there. I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions that people maybe still hold about Taiwanese manufacturing is it's cheap, it's low quality, it's going to fall apart. You know, you're getting what you pay for. From what I've seen, it seems to be one of the biggest bangs for your buck in terms of horse multiplier. You can spend $100,000 in place A or if you spend $100,000 here, the level of machine you're getting for that is leaps and bounds above. It's like we were looking at, you know, we've looked at Japanese and German machines and Korean machines and different things. And then we talk about Haas and I started with Haas, but like these machines are now priced under Haas. You know what I mean? And so they're so affordable, but they're rock solid. They're built like a Japanese machine. Taiwan is unique in the places I've been fortunate enough to visit and check out the manufacturing scene because they don't see manufacturing as an industry in decline or something to rebuild. They see it as the lifeblood of their economy. And with everyone pulling in the same direction, I think we'll be seeing a lot more to come from Team Taiwan. If you get the chance, make sure you get over there for the next TMTS.