Brother Drill and Tap Center

[mold100]

Any one run one of these, I may be interested in one if I hear anything good. I ran fanuc robodrill's and this machine looks very close. Except it is a brother cnc controller. In my history with Mastercam and Surfcam I dont believe I have ever come across a post for a brother. I am assuming (and we know what happens then) it is a fanuc clone.I am sure its probably not as good as the robodrill, but 10k spindle and under 30grand, looks like new but its a 95 or 96. Any input will greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[toy4x4]

I used to take care of 3 brother TC machines.

They are good machines for their intended purpose, but the company that I worked at wanted them to do more. For drilling and tapping they are good. For light milling they are O.K., and heavy milling I do not recommend. The nice thing about them is that they have a direct drive spindle.The ones I worked with had the brother control with conversational programming. It asks the question and you just fill in the blank. Last I heard there was not a MC post for them, since they are conversational. You might contact your reseller to see if one could be custom made for it. Hope this helps. If you have any other questions let me know.

[spade117]

We have one. Been in use for about 5 or 6 years. It has been pretty good. The controller seems to be a modified fanuc.

 

If you have any specific questions feel free to ask. I may be able to help with the post also.

[mold100]

It would be strictly for running composites and alum. but 98% of what I do is all 3D basically impossible to manually program or even with conversational. There is also a Kira with a fanuc but looks a little whooped the brother looks very well taken care of. Thanks, as far as tolerance in plastics and alum within .0005 ? only a 30 taper machine.

[mold100]

Brother CNC720 G-CODE CONTROL is the control which makes me believe a fanuc post may need a little caressing but will work.

 

Thanks spade, I actually am not running MC as of yet, business goes good the next year and I will be able to upgrade from surfcam. Mastercam is where my heart is as most people here know. Most machines including Yasnac, Haas and fadal are all started out with fanuc posts.

[spade117]

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Thanks, as far as tolerance in plastics and alum within .0005 ? only a 30 taper machine.

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We mostly use it for the same thing. Holding .0005...that depends on the machine has been through. I would say after what we have put into it, it still holds .001 well.

[Rob_Bish]

We are using a Brother TC32B HSK A40 spindle taper for through coolant with system 3R workpal 24 station pallet loader and 2 axis Kitagawa indexing head. Only ever cut steel on it and no problems. Catalog states in inch's:

Positional accuracy 0.0002/11.8

Repeatability +- 0.00012

[JNO]

My last place of employment had 2 brother machines. they are OK for light duty work. Unfortunatly the owner thought differently, his idea was to push them till the endmill breaks, then back it off a little. Machines always had a hard time with corners. We did a lot of aluminum parts with channels and the machine would always leave material in the corners. Alot of it had to do with the feeds we were running, but the Mori Seiki machines never had that problem. Since you will be doing a lot of 3D work this may be a problem for you. The machines they had were not conversational, we used to program them with SmartCam.

[mold100]

JNO, more than likely was not all the control leaving the stock, at high feedrates a 30 taper spindle just is not that rigid. Or very well could have been overcomping the corners but 1st instinct says spindle size. They are ment to be fast accurite light duty machines. Thanks for the input.

[Rob_Bish]

Dont know about the older machines but our new one has a High accuracy mode A with vibration control. You can also have automatic Z-axis thermal distortion compensation.

[JNO]

mold100, most of the channels we were doing were under 1/4". I don't think it was the taper size. Just that the machine did not comp well on corners. We used to do the same parts on Mori Seiki and Robodrill machines, and we did not have the same problems with the corners. The owner actually called Brother and asked them what the deal was, and they admitted the machines weren't very accurate when milling at high feeds. I did some research on them a while back and found out Brother is big in the sewing machine market. They are expanding into the machining market.

 

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You can also have automatic Z-axis thermal distortion compensation.

 

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Thermal expansion was a big problem on the older brother machines. Over the course of 8 hours the machines would sometimes change up to (.003).

[mold100]

Yes they are sewing machine guru's. Thanks for the input, what would you say ipm is high feed rates that they would leave stock. Could I run 100 ipm acurately or would I have to run down around 40 to 60? I can still rough in the 200 to 300 ipm range in some materials? leaving .008 to .01 to finish? Is that suitable?

[Rob_Bish]

Take a look.

 

http://pub.brother.com/pub/com/machine/mov...c32b_qt_m01.wmv

[mold100]

thats impressive surely a new machine.

[spade117]

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Thanks for the input, what would you say ipm is high feed rates that they would leave stock. Could I run 100 ipm acurately or would I have to run down around 40 to 60? I can still rough in the 200 to 300 ipm range in some materials? leaving .008 to .01 to finish? Is that suitable?

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We have an aluminum part that we rough with an Iscar 1.5" 6 flute face mill, that we rough at 396ipm(maximum feed of machine) at .075" depth cuts(S12000). For a finish we slow it down to 75 ipm with a depth cut anywhere from .005-.02" .

[JNO]

The machine in that video looks just like the twin pallet machine I used to run.( although it had a vertical toolchanger and it would do toolchanges so fast, if you weren't watching closely, you would miss it.

 

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Could I run 100 ipm acurately or would I have to run down around 40 to 60?

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Yes, we would run 1/8 end mills at 80/100imp. But we would have to slow down in the corners, or program to remachine corners.

[mold100]

http://www.northeastprecision.com/RoboDrill.html

 

Brand new robodrill MATE has Oi-mc control brand new 38,500. Wow