CNC Apps Guy, you really simplified one part of the puzzle for me. I thought we were basically going to be probing around in the dark to see what's there before choosing a program. Now I see that it could be as simple as using a .250 block to call program #250. Mount the block in the same location for each tombstone face or pallet, probe one or two points to identify the part and automatically call it up and run from there. Good stuff! I see I'm going to have to tighten up my programming. Probably half of the programs we produce don't run successfully on the first shot. I've only ever worked in one other shop in my life and their programs usually needed work too. Same goes for anyone I've talked to who has done CNC programming, though I admit I haven't talked to many other programmers. I get the impression that you guys are posting programs that run fine pretty much every time on the first shot. Is that true? What percentage of your programs would you say are just fine on the first part?

quote: Once you take the plunge and decide to get a horizontal, the best move you could make would be to get some hands-on training on a similar machine. This could be a bit of a problem if my machine dealer isn't up on this method of operation and the two guys here at our shop with horizontal experience have only been involved with those machines doing large quantity setups. Unless I quit my job and come to work with one of you guys I don't know where I'm going to find this training. Any suggestions there? My Makino rep is going to a machine tool show in Houston tomorrow and Thursday and I've been thinking of going to check that out. Have any of you guys learned much about new methods or systems from attending shows like this? Points taken about the larger number of tools and finishing tombstones in place on the machine. Any links for good tombstone suppliers would be appreciated as well. I think I see how this can be set up basically as a string of jobs lined up to go into the machine where the job could be the same part several times in a row or could be a few of this, one of that, then a few more of this, one of those etc as parts are ready to run. Is that something like what we're looking at? If so, that brings me to the probe and program call function. I assumed you had to know what the probe was going to check and have a program to move the probe to those places to check their locations, but I don't see how that could work if the probe is starting with an unknown. Are there any good books available that I could learn from in addition to the guidance you guys are offering? Anyone know for a fact if my Dallas Makino rep is up on any of this stuff and able to help implement a system? As always, thanks.

GVM, I don't know if you've been lucky or if we got a dog, but I sure don't want another one of these machines. We've replaced the spindle $$chiller and the $$$spindle both out of warranty. Also the machine will sometimes drop a tool or botch a tool change causing us to have to go into the help screen to close the tool changer door etc. Also sometimes the machine will alarm out for a bad circle endpoint or some other crazy thing on a program that runs fine many times before, and after the alarm is cleared. It has also a few times been unable to traverse the axes at startup causing me to have to go into the help screen and jog jog jog to get it back on the other side of a limit switch or something until it decides it's ok. It does great work and it's very fast, but it's so tempermental I'm sort of sorry we bought that machine.

The price thing is sort of a freak since Haas makes a big jump in capacity from 20" directly to 33" and Makino makes several smaller steps. The base price difference in the machines is only about 12 percent and may even get significantly CLOSER since Haas has their fixed prices and the Makino rep said there is wiggle room even without me asking. I really appreciate all of your guidance and willingness to share some of your experience. Rick, can you possibly shoot me some links for some of those tombstone configurations? I've seen the stuff on the Tombstone City website, but the ones you mention don't seem to be there. Also from CAM-mando's "Makino A51" thread, I saw the techni-grip system mentioned and checked it out. Looks like a sweet system especially well suited to working three sides of a part. I'll be checking further into that as well.

I contacted my Makino rep in Dallas and he was asking the same old questions about how many thousands of parts per setup we plan to run. With that in mind, I'm not very hopeful about learning the fine points about this type of strategy from him. Have you guys got any pointers that may help steer my sales rep in the right direction for support? Know of any way I can get my shop into this mode of operation? I understand what you're saying about being able to reach multiple sides of a part in one setup (Left side/front/right side of the tombstone and degrees of rotation of needed) and I also see what a great advantage it would be to have 60 tools on the machine since I could set up 40 tools that would do 95 percent of my work and just load up the odd tool here and there as needed. There are some things that aren't connecting for me though, maybe related to how the probing works, how the fixturing is initially established or possibly a lot of things I haven't considered. Where can I get the information to fill those gaps to get on the road to successful implementation of this type of system? I'm also concerned that this may require more programming support than I currently have available (see first post). Is there much more work involved in the planning of the short run horizontal setup, or it it mostly a matter of being well organized? By the way, one of our main parts that has us interested in the horizontal has a length of 21 inches and a bore running perpendicular to the long axis of the part. That way I see it and please correct me if I'm wrong, we would like to mount the part with the 21" length vertical so we can bore from the left or right tombstone face. If we do that, then we would need the EC-630 to get that capacity from Haas, or a Makino A61. Looks like the Makino machine price is only 10-15% more than the Haas in this case! Thanks again guys...

My shop is looking at buying more machinery and I'd like to get some input. Currently, we have two programmers; one part time who does nothing but program and myself. I program some stuff here and there between general shop problem solving, talking to customers etc. Machines on the floor: (1) DMG DMU 60T Speed 5 axis (1) Haas 5/40TR 5 axis (2) Haas VF2/SS 3 axis mills (1) Haas Super mini-mill (1) Haas G510 Gantry Mill (1) Haas SL20 with live tooling (1) Mazak QT20 Lathe (programmed by the operator) Please don't be slammin the Haas machines, we do 90+ percent aluminum work and they are working fine for us. Actually the problem child of all our machines is the DMG :/ Also the Mazak has been a great machine and I love the simplicity and reliability of that lathe. We're probably heading toward another VF2/SS and a VF6/40TR but we've also been thinking a lot about a horizontal machine. What troubles us most about the horizontal is it seems like the setups are far more involved which makes the machine suited only to larger batches of parts, and most of our batches are small. We typically have a lot of 1-12 pc orders, a fair amount of 25-50 pc orders and a rarely some 100+ pcs. Also, some of our most complex pcs are running on 5 axis for positioning only and those are in batches that were 25 pcs, grown to 50 pcs and maybe soon heading for 75 pc+ size batches. These are the parts we are thinking would be the best candidates for a horizontal machine, but we don't have enough of just them to keep a horizontal busy. How do you guys decide when the horizontal machine is the right choice? It seems like I've read things about some people using horizontals for low quantity or even even one piece jobs, but I've been searching around and haven't been able to find that again to see who might be doing that. If we were to get a horizontal machine and it ran maybe 25 of it's capacity on our complex parts, could we just throw a vise on a tombstone and run short jobs exactly as on the vertical machines? If we did do that, would we be able to change part programs by simply rotating the part model and/or changing the WCS? Looking for any pointers or food for thought you guys might have, thanks.

The top one should be great if you orient the part so that the flat surface you're working on is perpendicular to the spindle and use use a surface finish path with a flat endmill.

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With the part tilted toward you, the trunion can hit the bottom of the head assembly when the tool is reaching down into the part. With the part rotated away from you, that can't happen.

You probably don't need to do any indexing, subprograms or fixture offset changes. (At least I've never had to do any of that.) Each operation will output the proper A and B values to orient the machine as you have programmed it. Leave all operations on G54 and let Mastercam do some of the thinking for you. Set your clearance planes well above the part to be safe at least until you get a feel for the part movement as it changes between programmed tool planes.

Some pointers to help you get going... 1) Program your parts in incremental mode. This will allow you to translate the part after programming. If you ever run into a clearance problem, or have to recut your fixture for some reason, or if everything doesn't fall into place quite as planned, being able to reposition your part is massively helpful. 2) pick one WCS and stick with it. I don't know about all trunion machines, but ours will tolerate only one part origin, and that is at the intersection of the A and B axis centers of rotation. From what you said, it sounds like yours is the same. I usually move my model around and orient it for best use of the TOP WCS/CPLANE/TPLANE and then program the entire part in the TOP work coordinate system. Use your TPLANEs to see and work on the non-TOP sides of your part. 3) Use circles to construct your GVEIWS. When you want to look at your part normal to a feature, you can pick GVIEW by entity but you will usually only have a few options concerning the orientation of the part in the new view. If you use the part geometry to construct a circle on three points, you can pick the circle as your GVIEW entity and you will have eight available orientations to set your new workplane. You can also use your mouse to rotate your viewpoint of the part to whatever you like and simply save the current graphics view. I like to do that when I have deep vertical fillets on a part and need to clean them our with a small ball end mill. 4) No doubt you'd like to see what's going on while the part is cutting, but it's safer to allow your part to tilt away from you where you can't see it behind the trunion. (My boss used to ask "can't you cut that out here where we can watch?") You can get a nasty crash that way and you won't see it coming if you're watching the tool. (No, I didn't have to crash it to learn! lol) Simple stuff, but they may help you get on track with a bit of understanding. I also used the books for 4 and 5 axis as well as lathe programming, and I had the same complaint about doing stuff without knowing why.

Thanks Thad, good band! There's a lot of talent in the area, it's a good place for music lovers =) The job is still available by the way. We had someone that looked promising but it didn't work out =(

5:26 Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz ABIT IP35 Pro Motherboard OCZ Gold 4GB(2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 Dual Channel GeForce 8800GTX Video Card (2X) WD Raptor 74GB 10,000 RPM HDD in RAID 0 WinXP Home About $1500 total + monitor and Windows.

I've never been excited about Haas, but I do think they represent a good value. We now have 6 of them in our shop and they make us money. Maybe if we were doing super scientific work they wouldn't be our choice, but we're making aircraft parts mostly from aluminum and the Haas machines are having no trouble with that. We have had problems here and there but service has been pretty good and pretty affordable as well. Or you could buy that super duper deluxe DMG 5 axit with the tilting head, have constant problems and be facing a spindle replacement like we are here. For a bit ove $600 the DMG guy will come out and look at the machine and see if the spindle is indeed "going out" of if there is another problem, and if we do need a replacement it's $47,992.50!!

We are looking for someone experienced with Mastercam to program our 3 axis milling centers, live tool lathe, 5 axis trunion and 5 axis tilting head machines. We currently have 10 machines and need to add a couple more as well as a full time programmer. Located in Denton Tx, just North of Dallas and Fort Worth. If interested please call Wade at 940-566-4950

I haven't noticed any circle quadrant problems with our VF2SS machine, though I admit it would have to be pretty bad to show up when milling 1.25" holes with a 1/2" endmill. Very fast and smooth and no problems since we bought it new about 15 months ago. You can buy Techniks tool holders which are cheaper than most of the top brands and are pre balanced to 2.5G at 18,000rpm and not worry about balancing equipment. techniks usa

Might want to make some work stops like this one. Handy to have and has enough going on to make an interesting project. Penn Tool Work Stop

Go into Settings>Configuration>Screen and check the box for use "free" mode in dynamic spin. You should be all set.

Yes what Tim Johnson said. Also you can get a spray mist unit for your bridgeport machine which will allow you to let something run while you go do something else. I used to run a manual Bridgeport type machine and even there the mist unit was a huge help because I was able to use both hands on the machine without the part going dry. I don't know anything about the seller, but here's what I found on my first spray mist unit search just so you can see what I'm talking about if you're not familiar. Spray mist unit

I'm running a Multicam router and it seems not to like arc moves outputs without I and J, so I'd like to force X, Y, I and J outputs on every arc move, even if the value is zero. I have rotated the part so the arc ends are not at X0 or Y0 which does force I and J to post, and set breakarc to 0 but I still get code that looks like this: quote: G00 Z-.1 G01 Z.141 F.5 G01 X-11.416 Y-3.889 F2. G03 X-11.394 Y-4.147 I-10.924 J-3.976 G03 X11.394 Y4.147 G03 X-11.394 Y-4.147 G03 X-11.245 Y-4.359 I-10.924 J-3.976 G01 X-11.213 Y-4.321 I have backed up the post and have been altering some of the parc and parc2 statements but have not been able to produce anything useful yet. the statements in my post are as follows: quote: pcirout #Output to NC of circular interpolation pbld, n$, sgplane, *sgcode, pxout, pyout, pzout, parc, pfr, pcan1, e$ parc #Select the arc output if arcoutput$ = zero, parc0 else, parc2 parc0 #Arc output for I, J, K iout = i$ * x_mult jout = j$ * y_mult kout = k$ * z_mult iout, jout, kout I haven't been able to figure out yet what statement is preventing repeat coordinates or zero coordinates from posting. Help please?

I've also used an ID threading tool to chamfer before parting. Good stuff for sure.

Haha, no Lars, that was just something I ran across one time that struck me funny and seemed easy enough to live up to. Besides, it has that cool ø in it that's not on my keyboard. Just makes me that much more a pain I suppose but I don't take things too seriously. Thanks again for all the advice guys. I ended up talking to the Sandvik guy and the Mitsubishi guy. Looks like Sandvik is going to be the winner since the cutting specs are so similar and the Sandvik tool is a good bit less expensive.

Make sure you assign a work offset to the first operation or it will start your program with the first assigned offset it finds.

I've done several small jobs from 304 and annealed 17-4PH but never the heat treated 17-4 and none that produced 30+ pounds of chips. I've used whatever I had hanging around and it has usually been a pain. Since this is going on our very busy and only 5 axis mill I need to buy the right tools to make the job as painless as possible. Of course it will be great to have those tools on hand for future stainless jobs too. Looks like I'll be checking with the Sandvik and Hanita folks today. Thanks a ton guys.

Is anyone here cutting much 17-4 cond H900? I have a customer wanting a part that has to be cut from 17-4PH Stainless in the H900 condition, which looks like about HRC 44. The part will be cut on our Haas 5 axis VF5 machine from a 4"x4"x8" piece of barstock, about 90 percent of which will be milled away. Maximum tool reach required is about 2.5" and there are several .25" deep pockets with .125" inside corner radii and .125" fillets on the floors. The majority of the part could be done with a 3" face mill ( or 2" or 1" depending on what I find out), and the pockets can be cut with 3/8" and 1/4" solid carbide bull and ball endmills. We don't do much stainless at all and have never cut from the hardened condition so I'm at a bit of a loss for tooling selection. Also it's only one part and I'm not eager to call in a bunch of tool reps to come and talk my ears off. Thanks.