# Robodrill and Speedio: A Price Table, a 404, and Almost No Failure Evidence

> One brand has a family-wide price curve. The other has no model page at all. What we found, what we did not, and why thin evidence is not the same as a reliability finding.

Updated: 2026-08-21. Source: CNC Ledger — https://cncledger.com/guides/robodrill-speedio-tappers/ (claims cited to primary sources; see /methodology/).

Fanuc Robodrill and Brother Speedio machines get grouped together for good reason. Both are compact vertical machining centers built for high-speed, high-cycle work in shops where floor space costs money, and both tend to be bought by people who already know exactly which part they intend to run on them.

They get grouped together in our research for a less flattering reason: neither one produced usable failure evidence this pass. Here is what we have, split into what is sourced and what is not.

## Robodrill has a price curve. It is family-wide.

Machinio's general Robodrill family page gives a price-by-year table:

- 2000 to 2004: $20,500 to $26,900

- 2005 to 2006: $21,950 to $45,000

- 2008 to 2018: $32,500 to $77,500

Read that as a floor-and-ceiling reference for the whole Robodrill line, not as pricing for a specific machine. The page covers 21 submodel variants, including the alpha-D21SiB5, D21LiB5, D28LiB5, the D21MiA and MiA5 and MiB5, and the older T21iF and T10B lines. Our dedicated D21MiB5 slug fetch 404'd, so there is no submodel breakout behind those numbers. A specific D21MiB5 will sit somewhere much narrower inside that spread depending on year and configuration, and that $32,500-to-$77,500 band is far too wide to negotiate against on its own. All five current family listings showed contact-for-price.

## The Speedio has no price data at all

Not thin. None. The Machinio model page 404'd under both slug forms we tried, brother/speedio-s700x1 and brother/s700x1. There is no dedicated model page, so there is no table, no listing count, and no dated comp.

If you have read a Speedio price range somewhere else, ask where it came from, because it did not come from the same public source that produced the Robodrill and Haas tables. We are not going to write "tracks a similar range to the Robodrill," which would be a guess dressed up as a comp.

What the absence probably means, and this is inference rather than evidence: these machines move through specialist dealer channels and job-shop networks more than through public aggregator listings. That is consistent with the Robodrill family page also showing all five of its current listings as contact-for-price. But we cannot rule out that the page simply exists under a slug we did not guess.

## The failure evidence, or the lack of it

This is the part worth being blunt about. Our Robodrill video pass produced zero extractable transcript claims. Four videos identified, three with captions disabled outright, and the fourth yielded nothing. We have titles and channels and no content. No repair costs, no bearing-failure documentation, no teardowns.

One correction matters here, because it is the kind of error that propagates. The air-turbine spindle content associated with Robodrill is a third-party aftermarket accessory, specifically Air Turbine Tools demonstrating autochange with its 625XDT and 602DT high-speed spindles on a Robodrill. That is an add-on somebody bolted on. It is not the stock Robodrill spindle, and anyone writing that "Robodrills use air-turbine spindles as standard" has read an accessory video as a spec sheet.

On the Brother side there is one genuinely relevant video: a recovery after a shop air-supply interruption caused a spindle and tool-changer fault. The transcript we captured is a fragment, cutting off mid-sentence at "we turned the air off from the air compressor, there was enough air in the machine to." We do not have the resolution, the procedure, or any cost or downtime figure. What it does confirm is real and worth acting on: the Speedio spindle and ATC are air-dependent, and losing shop air is a live fault scenario rather than a theoretical one.

Yamazen, the North American Brother distributor, also publishes grease replacement as a taught maintenance procedure on Brother machine tools. Captions were disabled, so we have the existence of the procedure and not its interval or cost. Still, a distributor formally training a lubrication procedure tells you where routine attention goes on these machines.

## What thin evidence does and does not mean

There is a comfortable reading available here: these machines are so reliable that nobody bothers filming their failures. It might even be true. It is not what our evidence shows.

What our evidence shows is that captions were disabled on the videos we found. That is a data-collection outcome, not a machine-quality outcome. Low public failure documentation is genuinely consistent with high reliability. It is equally consistent with a smaller installed base, with owners who route repairs through Fanuc or Brother service without shopping the price publicly, or with a buyer population that does not make YouTube content. We cannot separate those explanations with what we have, so we are not going to pick the flattering one and call it a finding.

Practically: do not treat the absence of documented Robodrill or Speedio failures as evidence of durability when you are pricing risk. Treat it as a gap in your information, and close it with your own inspection rather than with an assumption.

## The one thing we are confident about

Compressed air. The Speedio evidence establishes air dependency directly, and the wider point is documented far better elsewhere in our records. On the Haas [VF-2](/machines/haas-vf-2/), where the older spindles use an air-oil mist lubrication system, a technician suspected the loss of a working air dryer on the shop compressor as a contributing cause of a prior bearing failure, through water contamination carried down the air line. Different brand, same physics. Wet air reaches the bearings.

So if your shop air is unreliable or damp, that is not an inconvenience on this class of machine. It is a fault source with a documented recovery scenario on one side and a documented bearing failure on the other.

Before you buy one, that means two questions. What is the seller's air setup, and has this machine ever thrown an air-loss ATC or spindle fault? And on your own side, is your air dry and stable enough to host it? A dryer sized for your actual demand is part of the machine's purchase price whether it appears on the invoice or not.

## Inspection, adjusted for what we do not know

- Confirm exactly which submodel you are looking at. There are 21 Robodrill variants on the family page and their spindle and travel specs are not interchangeable. Match the nameplate to what you intend to run, and do not rely on a family-level price band to tell you whether the ask is fair.

- Warm and run the spindle through its range. Listen and measure runout at the taper. We have no Robodrill or Speedio-specific runout threshold published, so if you want a reference number, the spindle-economics source used elsewhere in our records treats under 0.0002 inch as healthy on Haas VF-series machines. Borrowed, not native.

- Cycle the tool changer repeatedly, ten times or more, and watch for hesitation on pickup or stiffness in the carousel. We cannot rank this against other failure modes because we have no failure data, but it is cheap to check and the air-loss evidence points at the ATC directly.

- Inspect air lines for cracks and moisture, and ask about the shop's dryer and any history of air-loss faults.

- Ask what it cut, at what speed, and how many hours per day. This is the question that substitutes for evidence we do not have.

- Budget the unknown. On a Haas VF-series machine you can anchor a repair reserve to published spindle numbers, rebuild $4,800 to $7,200 and replacement $16,000 to $24,000. No equivalent published figure exists for either of these machines, so get a quote from Fanuc or Brother service, or a certified shop, before you commit rather than after something breaks.

These are good machines by reputation and they occupy a real niche. But reputation is what you have when evidence is missing, and we would rather hand you the gap than paper over it.