KME 5ax Tombstone

[Eric@HorsepowerInc.]

Does anyone here have experience with these or any KME products? We are currently looking to upgrade our production needs by adding a Horizontal with a 5ax tombstone to increase productivity. Any input on quality or longevity of these would be greatly appreciated.

[crazy^millman]

I have been to their shop Eric and they are a good group of guys. They care to make the best product possible and keep looking for ways to improve things. The positive air pressure and the Stainless tubing for all the electrical components is great. Jerome puts all his heart into this product and they use them in their Job shop as well. They make all kind of things from CNC routers to one off stuff and also do some production and that is where they came up with the KME indexer from. I have his card around here some where can try to dig it up or you can just go to their web site and contact them directly.

[Eric@HorsepowerInc.]

Thanks Ron, I hoped you would reply being they are in your neck of the woods. With the exception of our Haas, all our 5ax products are ran on Komo tables. We are just curious of the quality/ repeatability of these, aside from tight tol. Bores, locations are .001/.002 and wanted to make sure it could handle that. A KME rep is stopping with our Doosan guy on Tuesday to give us some info. We are looking to add this soon if all looks good, we would be putting the tombstone in a Doosan HP series Horizontal.

[crazy^millman]

They are very strong the gear system they use is nothing like I have ever seen before. They were talks with some OEM's to have their stuff be standard equipment, but not sure where any of those has gone yet. I did tell them to be very careful of one OEM that is know to take people's ideas and have it made in China.

[Craig-B]

I just got 4 of them in my shop, they work as describe you can rotate each rotary independent of the other which is a nice feature. You can buy them custom with the rotaries however you want your fixture, if the standard don’t fit your needs.

Note: It is not a true 5 axis but you can rotate and machine at the same time.

It takes 3 sec to index 90 degrees and 350 foot pounds of force will move the alignment off of C0.

I have had a few glitches with the control box freezing during setup and I have to cycle the power or Shuttle my Pallet to clear it. But not running.

Its programmed with (DPRNT) statements and that can be a lot of code when you have a lot of indexes, so I wrote a macro sub. I also created a option in my HMC post to output the code as a (DPRNT) or a (Macro Sub) in the Misc. Integer/Reals (KME Rotary Axis Number/ KME Rotary Position)

 

Example: Rotate 1 & 3 to 90 degrees and 2 & 4 to 45 degrees

 

DPRNT[C1*90]

DPRNT[C2*45]

DPRNT[C3*90]

DPRNT[C4*45]

M21

G4X500

 

With a macro Example: Rotate 1 & 3 to 90 degrees and 2 & 4 to 45 degrees

 

G65P1234R5C90.0

G65P1234R6C45.0

 

[Joe788]

Craig, is there any feedback to let the machine know that the indexing has been completed?

[Eric@HorsepowerInc.]

FNMI that's good info to know! I'm not real fond of a separate control box to be programmed, we already do that with a older SMW 4th. So the box reads M codes from the program then?, and is connected to the control via rs232 port? We have a ton of indexes in each part, then that would be multiplied x 8 in this set-up. What are your thoughts now that you have a macro for this, just as easy as A/C calls in a normal program?

[Craig-B]

By program it has a feed back to the control if you give it a (DPRNT P0) It will wait until it gets the signal of completion, or if you give it a (DPRNT P1) It will index without waiting. so you can control the positioning of the other rotaries while working on one.

 

Note: The control box doesn't not need to be programmed it just sends the programmed angle via RS232 to the rotaries. They function by the angle you send in the (DPRNT) statement. KME rotary fixtures are unique as for the rotation in this aspect. Some other companies you rotaries only function by the (M-code) and you have to program the control box with the indexes. If your rotary only works with the (M-code) a macro will not be any help with your rotations.