Legacy. Mature. Obsolete. Secondary. Classic.
These are words you’re likely to hear when you have a problem with your machinery or a decision to make about your machinery. They may sound good, but they’re generally euphemisms for “old.” Do you want to stick with your old machine, you’re being asked, or get a new one?
Legacy machinery is old machinery, typically machinery that is no longer made. There is an implication that there’s still value in the machinery — a legacy, after all, is what you leave to the future — but there is usually very reasonable concern about the availability of legacy parts. If the machinery is no longer being made, where are you supposed to get legacy parts for your legacy machinery?
For Rexroth electric motion control, the question of getting parts has a simple answer. Rexroth does not sell those parts. You can’t get a legacy part in the mail and pop it into place on the machine. Third party repair shops have no source of original parts for legacy components, and we’ve seen that they often cannibalize old parts or just use something that looks sort of similar to the original parts.
Mature machinery is machinery that has reached the mature stage of its product life cycle. The classic economics term means that its at the peak of its market. More marketing will not cause more people to buy it. Everyone who needs it already knows about it and probably already has it. There are no new variations on it that could be developed and marketed. A consumable mature product that people continue to want may live on for decades — hammers, for example, continue to be popular even though there’s nobody out there thinking, “Gee, I wish there was some kind of tool I could use to push small pieces of metal into wood!”. For industrial machinery, however, mature products usually go out of production.
But obsolete machinery is something completely different. If your legacy Rexroth servo motor runs your machinery just as well as it did when it was first installed decades ago, there’s no reason to declare it obsolete. Obsolete machinery is something like your 8-track player: it’s not useful any more. It no longer is up to the job, and you need to replace it.
Fortunately, Rexroth continues to support legacy electric motion control components with factory repair and reman. You can get your components back with like-new functioning and a factory warranty. That’s when your mature machinery with legacy parts can really be called a classic.