Makino post

[Kannon]

We are looking at a Makino Wire E.D.M.

 

is there a post that supports them? Or what post should I be looking at getting for them.

 

Pros and Cons WIRE EDM

Makino SP43 vs. Agie Progress V2

 

 

anyone have any experiences they could share with these machines.

[cadman2112]

Your reseller should be able to get his hands on the Makino 4X post

[ToolMan184]

I would steer clear of an AGIE and get a FANUC. M2C

[Kannon]

thank you

[Brad St.]

Brian, we are running an SP43 here we got over a year ago. We love it, give me a call and let's talk.

 

Brad

[Columbo™]

We have an SP43 on order and should have it in place by year end.

 

Any feed back on this wire machine would be appreciated.

[Brad St.]

Depending on if you have the newer software (heat) it is a very nice machine. We unfortunately do not have it on ours. Probably the biggest thing we will get frustrated with is small hole threading (Ø.030" and under) it takes some finesse to get it consistant. We do a majority of one ups for our various fixtureing and share the machine between 5-6 various users. Being not just one person is running it the other hiccup we will run into is simply maintainance. Rotating the energizer plates to making sure the water is full. simple things that more often than not your in and out very quick on it.

 

Power tables are very accurate, we have not had any troubles when wanting to go for holding .0002" easily either in steel or aluminum. We've done some copper and titanium with no troubles either.

 

One thing is not to be afraid to ask for something if you don't see it on the display screen. we were having trouble learning the 4x and made the comment one day as to how we could tell what the actuall head were set for. The commment back was "Oh well if we turn on this feature you'll be able to see the programmed taper as well as the actual" . It was exactly what we were looking for and the machine had the capability already in, all they tech had to do was turn it on.

 

We are very happy with it.

[Josh T™]

The Agie Machines are amazing! We have 2... Evolution and a Vertex III. The only issues that I have heard with Agies is the MC wire post processors have to be dead nuts to get it right. I use PEPS to program our Agies and have absolutely no complaints either way.

 

FYI: We held .000040 straightness, taper, cylindricity, & size with a 3 ra finish on 52100 60rc on a 6.375 tall cut with teh Vertex with 5 passes!

[Guest]

quote:

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FYI: We held .000040 straightness, taper, cylindricity, & size with a 3 ra finish on 52100 60rc on a 6.375 tall cut with teh Vertex with 5 passes!

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shucks, i do that all the time on just a roughing pass.

[Brad St.]

LMAO at Del

 

Dude, I want some of that water in your bowl !!

 

Pretty impressive Josh, you got it dialed in!!

[OTOMMYO]

What do you guys think of Sodick.

We hate it!

[Guest]

i had an old sodick we just sold.it had its day.i like the fanucs as far as the bang is for the buck.it cant do what the high end agies can do but pretty close.

[mold100]

We have a Sodick and a fanuc, we had a mits right before the sodick bought it new we kept it 6 months dumped it for the sodick. At this point we wouldnt look at another option we have a good relationship with Sodick. We have a cnc hole popper, the wire and thier high speed machining center. I do however know several people that have the Makino and are happy with them.

[MAKINOPAT]

I ran a few sodicks in the past and they were ok,definately not makinos. We are running all makino equipment here and looking to more than double what we have now after seeing what they will do! As far as the wire post our resser was able to get one that worked out of the box for us with our sp43. We have to set our E and D values in the control, only because we havn't had time to create a power library for this machine. Other than that we love it!

[Josh T™]

quote:

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Dude, I want some of that water in your bowl !!

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That's not water my friend... dats de-ionized Vodka!

[Brad St.]

Josh, LMAO

 

MAKINOPAT, I haven't tried yet but that was one of my request to our VAR was to be able to pull the libraries out and pul them back in like tool libraries. Honestly I haven't done it with X3 yet, i'm gonna look today. I spent 3-4 days building basic power libraries for steel and alum and copper so far. Stopped there as that covered 90% of what the 5 of us here us the machine for. Really handy when you do set them up all I do is create a self extracting zip and email it around to the guys to put in there libraries. Used to have it central to the net but found out real quick folks here were tweaking them without realizing what they were changning on others =). Unfortunatley I do not have security permissions to control the read write of files to our net either, thus I have them kept local now.

 

It really does save a huge amount of time once you build the libraries though, i'd recommend doing it even if you can only do a little at a time.

[Guest]

bradst, do you set up your power library and tell it how much stock to leave for each pass and things like that.i just set in in the wire control on the machine.i guess what im asking is what is the benifit of doing that in mastercam.

[ToolMan184]

I never set anything in the machine Del. My programs run straight from MC. All the power stuff is read from the program and the machine loads it automatically.

 

We just load a program, set 0 and go.

[Guest]

give me an example joe of a 1 inch thick pc. of d-2 4 passes. dont you have to originally get the offsets and power settings from the machine and enter them in mastercam to your liking.

[Brad St.]

Del, that's part of the library. You set up the libraries to have the E and D's all pre set from it. Now the one hangup we run into is let's say you wish to use the stock offset in MC. You MUST set it for each pass to have it work. Otherwise if you set is let's say when the first window for the ruff pass it does not hold that value for the following passes if you are doing more skims. Learned that the hard way.

 

Now if you can imagine how many definitions there are to each thickness and finsihes you get the idea of where I would find it HIGHLY beneficial if say someone could export the the library and work with it as text (which you can do). But at least in X2 you could not unfortunately bring that library back in.

[Guest]

maybe im old fashioned but i have my power library set to post out my power settings s1 s2 s3 s4 etc. and my offsets d1 d2 d3 d4 etc, everything else is greyed out. i then load the program in the machine,set the type of material, thickness and number of passes in control on the machine and im done.as far as doing all that in mastercam i am still confused as to how that will make things better.im not saying this is the best way but am trying to let you guys convince me that doing it in mastercam is better.

[Brad St.]

Nope not necessarily better but easier for multiple users. As I mentioned above we have on average 5 different Toolmakers running different parts. We program ahead and load our programs as we setup and go. No one is complaining about what the last guy left for defaults or offsets (usually anyway) so it works really well. You can do as you say and create your model data right at the machine very easily. Power settings are coded with E-files and Diameters are set with a D value. We have our post (Thanks much to Roger at Prototek) dialed in to use D variables which are defined at the beginning of the posted file. If it were a one man show running the machine through I could easliy see things being set up very much like what you are doing Del. I was talking with Brian L. when this post first started and mainly mentioned that this machine can be dialed in much further for even better performance especially if we did as you are but we are very satisfied with the parts and accuracy we get from the defaults and ease of use between and for us all. Kind of a testimony if you can please 5 Toolmakers with one machine.

[Brad St.]

Here is the typical power file library information from MC:

 

 

If we could only get that info out and back in it would be sooooo nice. As is you have to go through it in MC Wire and edit each field for each pass. . .yada yada yada. Consider between 5 people and any chance of fat fingers on the control compared to selecting one power file in which your skims and all are defined and previewed in your program file how nice it is. We see it before we cut it, unless verify crashes. . .

[Guest]

i see your point with multiple users.we only have 3 here that run the wires and i do most all of the programming and set up if it is important.that is the bad thing about the fanucs that if you have to tweak settings and offsets it is not saved in the program. you can do it but it has to be saved individually on a disk for future reference although it could be saved in the program in the control directory if it were part of my program.i could do that and i can see where that could come in handy.im always willing to learn a better way.

[Brad St.]

Well as we both said not necessarily better but another way to fillet a fish

 

Now on our Charmilles we've only recently started using MC on them to program for the iso's and cmd files. Those machines we are doing more often than not very specific work that we dial in up to the ten millionth's on them for the profiles we are trying to achieve. Almost everything is dialed in on the machine and the done as you Del and backed up to disk for future use and reference. I think if our head Guru down there could have MC putting info out the tenth decimal he'd be more comfortable, J/K.