O/T Thump and Bump

[chris m]

Thanks Jay

 

I just put some more up there

 

When we get the machine put back together I'll upload a victory photo

 

C

 

[ 03-13-2003, 04:14 PM: Message edited by: chris m ]

[McRae]

quote:

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I hope to Christ this works

---

Chris,

 

You have possibly started the next management fad - Instead of Preventitive Maintainence, I think that the new wave will be Devine Maintainence! Prayer and Luck will see us thru.

[chris m]

quote:

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Instead of Preventitive Maintainence, I think that the new wave will be Devine Maintainence!

---

I'd prefer Psychic Maintenance; I could have a vision and go out and tell the guy "You have the wrong offset in tool 7" BEFORE he smashes the machine

 

That would work pretty slick

 

C

[chris m]

As The Machine Turns (or doesn't; in this case)...

 

The Hardinge tech was in today and succesfully re-aligned the headstock of the machine which was viciously rotated; we then re-installed the lower turret carriage. Everything is looking OK so far, hopefully when we get the turret back on the machine everything will line up!

 

C

[chris m]

Oh now I'm back, from outer space, ....

 

Alright; we've got the turret back up on the machine, aligned properly, and all zero'd out properly (I think). Had to do a little cut-and-weld on the sheetmetal to clear our modifications but we are rounding the corner! Tomorrow all of the rest of the sheetmetal (with 15,000 accompanying screws) should be back in place and we'll see if the machine will make a part; if not, I'll drag it off the loading dock myself.

 

Today the guy who whacked it said "At least if it gets hit again we'll know how to take it all apart; ha-ha"

 

As I wiped the sweat from my brow I replied "If you whack it again I'll personally throw you into the trash compactor and push the start button"

 

I think he got the gist of what I was saying.

 

Time for a cold one

 

C

 

P.S. I put a couple of reassembly pictures up on the ftp

 

[ 03-19-2003, 04:57 PM: Message edited by: chris m ]

[Brendan P]

quote:

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Today the guy who whacked it said "At least if it gets hit again we'll know how to take it all apart; ha-ha"

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A: You didn't really let him near the machine again? (to fix it)

 

B: He obviously didn't learn anything,cause the words "next time" would not even be in his

vocabulary!

 

How much $$ to fix Chris??

[chris m]

Brendan

 

A: By "we'll" he meant "you'll" know how to take it apart. The guy in question is not in the kind of physical condition to do this type of work

 

B: I think he does actually feel bad about it but feels he can't say "I'm sorry that you have had to spend a week laying on the floor, upside down inside the machine, covered with chips." I would prefer that the manager speak to him and have a discussion about not being a cowboy (for which this guy has a well-deserved reputation) with $100K CNC machines, but we are not very big on discipline here.

 

I don't know the full cost yet; so far we have about $3000 in service-tech time alone from Hardinge just for guidance in the disassembly process and doing the spindle and turret alignments (it'd be about $10K if we didn't do most of the mechanical work ourselves) plus a bunch of parts.

 

If you add in 10 hours a day (90 hours total) for the machine at $135/hour and three guys (3 high-dollar guys, at that) at, call it $30/hour, for 100 total hours we're probably talking $15K minimum in "lost" dollars on top of that

 

I'll post the totals when we get the bills.

 

I'm definitely going to ask the manager to give a dollar value to this crash at the next shop meeting, that way when a guy says "I haven't had a raise in three years" we can say "that 20 grand we spent fixing the T51 would've been a nice raise for a few guys"

 

C

[Brendan P]

quote:

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I think he does actually feel bad about it but feels he can't say "I'm sorry that you have had to spend a week laying on the floor, upside down inside the machine, covered with chips."

---

Tell him to take you to Champions for lunch and

you'll forget all about it!

(good steak tips there)

[chris m]

OK

 

The results are in

 

The machine is (finally) all back together and properly re-aligned; whew!

 

Alignment was a real struggle because:

 

1) The turret was removed from the machine for repair

2) the turret top-plate was severely rotated during the crash

 

Because of this it was quite a workout getting it to line up.

 

There was also the small issue of a servo parameter that one of the Hardinge guys must've changed that caused the lower turret to just clamp-unclamp-clamp-unclamp every time it saw an index command; that only took me an hour on the phone to figure out...

 

The machine was making parts yesterday, though, and everything seems OK, so far. One of the other operators found a bent up boring bar somewhere and brought it into the office with a sad look on his face saying "Chris, I'm REALLY sorry..." I was momentarily not amused, but it actually was pretty funny.

 

I'll try to snap a pic today and put it with the rest on the ftp; I may get a couple pics into this thread with Rekd's help at some point.

 

So, anyway, here is the damage:

 

Machine downtime: $19,500

Our time internally: $4,000

Hardinge service: $4,000

Hardinge Parts: $250

 

Actual out-of-pocket: $4,250 (not bad)

Real cost: $27,750

 

There goes this month's profit

 

C

[Brendan O' Regan]

Chris,

Here are your Alignment Photo's. If you email me your new pic. i can put it up for you tomorrow morning as i am off home now.

 

 

[ 03-28-2003, 11:54 AM: Message edited by: Brendan O' Regan ]

[chris m]

Thanks a lot, Brendan!

 

I'll try to get that pic shot Monday

 

C

[chris m]

I'm going for the bump on this one just because its an amusing read for me now, though not real amusing when I wrote it and because I'd like some data from the rest of you folks on bent machines.

 

We have 15 CNC lathes and 6 VMCs at this time with 12 day shift and 6 night shift CNC operators, TWELVE of these being temporary employees. In the last month we have had 5 lathes bumped bad enough that we had to re-align the turrets and several near-misses and broken tool incidents that didn't require a teardown

 

Am I in crash-and-bash central, or what? Do those of you with some operators of 'limited' ability have these incidents as well..?

 

Just curious

 

C

[P_Scott]

Chris,

 

Out of curiosity do you happen to know what agency the temporary employees work for? A dozen temps seems excessive for something as technical as CNC operation. Are there really no qualified permanent people out there or is it just the company trying to cut down on labor costs?

[mayday]

it was a few years ago but we had a guy running our horazontal HN80C Niigata. we made a 50" sub plate for one of the pallets to run larger parts on.He ran the spindle nose into the face of the pallet 25" from the center of the indexer at 710 IPM.

Well to make a long story short, $12000 and a weeks work it was as good as new.

He still works here

[MACHINEMASTERG]

guess weve been lucky or extra careful cause nock on wood NO real crashes here ...but we did have a guy dump the whole 20x48 pallet with 5 kurt vices off the pallet cart ..OUCH

[JG]

A couple of fond memories....

new smt 6 with tail stock, funny thing, it's hard to see if there is clearence between the turret and tail stock, but it's very easy to HEAR, I bet that tail stock would have come in handy, never got it back on correctly.

 

At one point in time, I actually thought I invented friction welding, just forgot to patent it....

[CNCGUY]

We are in the process of re-building our BRAND NEW Emco 500. The operator wanted to adjust the W/C -.005, he missed the "." - OUCH

 

The turrett housing has been sent out for repair, for the most part its trash. They say its the worst crash they have ever seen.

 

The spindle is coming out today, the draw tube actuator wobbles when the spindle turns.

 

We are in week 5 of this mess and not sure when it will end. This machine was overbooked when we got it, way behind now.

 

The only saving grace is that we have insurance to cover this, repairs, downtime, etc. The deductable is $2500 - pocket change compared to what the final tally will likley be.

 

What do ya do with guys like this -

 

Take em out back and then

[chris m]

Peter we are in a 'no hire' period so everybody they bring in is a temp. We actually got some really good temp guys but they still screw up, our regular guys whack the machines too

 

Ever seen a tool change in a milling machine with a rag stuffed in the spindle?

 

I have; 3 times by three different guys in about 2 months

 

Cat 40 collet chucks sound pretty cool when they fall 20" onto a $1000 part

[robk]

This just happened this morning...

 

Operator loads a 19.5 x 29.5 x 5.875 chunk of 420ss (total weight=953lbs) on the tombstone of one of the horizontals. The first cut that he takes is a 2.5 drilled thru hole. Somehow the chip flying off hit the hydraulic line just right, and ripped it off the fitting. The spindle never got touched by the part falling off the tombstone as it went to rapid to its home position, but the damage to the way covers looks pretty bad ... Now we're trying to figure out how to get the part out of the inside of the (fully enclosed) machine without taking it apart... I wonder what is happening under the way covers also

[chris m]

Bummer

 

[HACK alert for below statement]

 

If you've got a big fork truck you could weld a piece of [big] square tubing to the forks for an outrigger and go for the chainfall-on-the-end trick

 

When you're done torch the tube off and grind the forks back to 'normal'

[robk]

Thanks Chris

 

That's probably the best solution with the least amount of work involved. We have fork extensions, but not sure what the capacity for them is yet, especialy having to use the very tip of them. As it is we have to remove one of the tombstones to get in from the front of the machine. Damn, I can't wait for this week to be over with.

[Müřlıń®]

I don't care how perfect your machine tool is.

 

Something mechanical is going to break eventually. Something electric will have a melt down or glitch sooner or later.

 

Something both mechanical and electrical, like CNC's.......they are destined to crash, sooner or later for no reason. It won't be anyone's fault, it will just happen. Because no one preforms maintence on them like they do on airplanes and stuff.....and they still break....

 

 

Kinda scary when you really thing about it.....

 

Murlin

[Philcott]

Stop!

.

.

.

.

.

.

Stop it I say!

.

.

.

I have worked for years to forget some of the horrors of my past and you guys are bringing to the surface some repressed memories.

.

.

.

 

$#!t

 

Now it's either back to the shrink or the bartender.

 

Phil

[MATT Q]

My favorite memory was when the operator decided to scroll down in the program to "look at something" and then scrolled back up started the cycle on the wrong line of code and tore the axis 4 and 5 casting clean off the machine in rapid which on a thermwood really cooks and it was a model 70 so that is the big one where the gantry moves alot of weith to stop. that was an expensive "look at something"

[chris m]

Well, time for yet another bump of this topic

 

I have 4 machines that are knocked out as of this moment.

 

1 has been bent for about a month, the operator is still very green so we figure as soon as we fix it he'll just whack it again...

 

1 has been bent for about 3 months but is gonna suck to fix so we keep putting it off

 

1 got bent yesterday: the guy got a little flustered yesterday with one of my counterparts hanging over his shoulder and picked up his program in the wrong spot. Cleaned about 3" off the end of the part with a $1000 custom back-boring tool [which pretty much erased the end of the bar BTW], knocked the turret out of alignment in both axes, all while running the hottest job in the place; NICE. I told him put another bar in and keep running it as long as it'd cut. Ran OK [offsets way off, but that's about it] to finish the job; now I gotta go take it apart and fix it

 

The last one was waiting for me this morning; the operator cleaned to tool setter probe off one of the lathes ['it just fell off' YEAH!]

 

Nice

 

C