Back in my Navy days, we had Standard-Modern on the ship. They were very good, at least to an 18 year old squid! My only complaint is they have an electric brake instead of a foot brake, and for the materials we machine, a foot brake is really important. I'm considering adding my own foot switch to trigger the electric brake.

We are looking to replace two of our manual engine lathes. The machines to be replaced are 22" X 80" Whacheon, Taiwanese copies of Mori Seiki. They are pretty good lathes other than being made in Taiwan. I wish there were American made options, but the best I could come up with are Standard-Modern, made in Canada, and American Turnmaster EVS (Colchester copy?) which comes from Taiwan but is assembled and wired at Lagun in Cali. Neither of these machines look as heavy as our current Whacheons, and sometimes we turn 2500# ingots in them, so they need some beef. Any suggestions, or machines to avoid?

Yup, 3D mouse. I don't know how anyone can program without one.

Take a look at a ball lock system such as Jergens. Steel ball lock sub plate stays on the machine, the just change out fixture plates (Aluminum or steel) to go from plate work to vise work, or whatever. Doesn't cost much more than doing your own when you factor in machine down time and man hours to make it.

We use one that is 4 station and it works great for us. We use it for slotting screws and have never had any problems.

Xform translate 3D

I like Hangsterfer's S737 in our Haas machines. No smell, and they stay clean.

If you want cheap and easy, buy a couple of cat 40 TG style holders or milling chucks, then use Lyndex ER collet extensions.

Solid carbide for most things if cutter is less than .75 Dia. I use indexable ball endmills for finishing steel dies. Seco high feed indexable mills to rough.

Not sure, but get yourself a 3DConnexion 3D mouse and you'll wonder how you ever programmed anything without it.

Sounds like you need a Royal Acculength collet chuck or go back to the probe idea.

We bought the Renishaw turret probe package with our TL-25BB. I'm no expert because I haven't actually used it yet, but when Renishaw came in and trained us, that was one of the things it would do. You would push your stock out with the bar feeder, then call up the Renishaw macro. The turret probe will bump the end of the part and update the work offset. I bought the probe to check venturi shaped bores with no flat areas to measure conventionally. This work went away before we had a chance to use the probe, so getting it up and running is on the back burner.

I've been using Jergens for my vise column and angle plates. Recently, I needed a tombstone in a hurry but the lead time from Jergens wasn't going to work for me. My tooling vender put me in touch with Stevens Engineering and they bailed me out and delivered a very nice tombstone made to the Jergens specs so it would fit the rest of my tooling. That said, I recommend either company, as the products I have recieved have been first rate and the engineers from both are easy to work with.

Hmm, never tried that. Maybe use incremental and select -3 as top of part and select 0 as depth?

I've been using a lot of Harvey tools.

I did have a spell of crashes recently. I tracked it to an imported solid model that I had programmed and then translated to the location it would be at on my horizontals 4th axis. After translating and re-genning, I had nothing but crashes. Once I made it through that job and moved on, X7MU2 has been stable for me.

Last specs I saw were Xeon 8 core 3.2Ghz. I asked if I could have 3.5Ghz, but haven't heard back yet.

I know this has been hashed out over and over, but what's one more time? I.T. is tired of my whining and are going to build me a new box. After reading all the threads I could find here, I asked for fast i7 processor and solid state drives. My I.T. guy said he did some research and still wants to use Xeon. He says the high end Xeon will perform better than the i7??? So far, he is looking at a Dell T5610 with single 8 core Xeon (hasn't told me speed yet) 512GB solid state drive, 64GB ram, and re-use the two Nvidia Quadro 4000 cards in my current computer. Any thoughts? Thanks

I sometimes wait 30 minutes or more for a re-gen on a high speed toolpath with X7 MU2, but it is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than X6 was.

I would recommend PCDMIS, or at least something that is industry standard. Our company was having a power struggle when it came time to hire a new metrologist, and they decided that the quality department owned the software and the shop owned the hardware. Now we have an old LK with two different software programs. Some of our parts are still inspected with the old CMIS software, and some with the new. Unfortunately, the quality group bought Camio software for programming, and it is not very easy to get support.

Around here they keep talking additive manufacturing (3D printing). I really don't see it taking our jobs though. There will always be a need for precision machining.

Coolant position on Haas is in the offset page. When the program calls the tool/offset, the machine will change coolant position to match what is on the control offset page.

Same thing here. I have a Dell T5500 with 8 core Xeon and 12 Gigs ram. When I re-gen, I only show around 15% usage and it takes a while. When I verify, it will max out at 100%, and still takes a long time. I'm trying to get IT to build me a new box with i7 and solid state drives.

I like the D'Andrea line sourced from Ingersoll. The kits are reasonably priced, modular, and do a very nice job.

Found out the hard way that there is a screen in the top of the reservior that needs to be cleaned periodically. Drop the tank from the lube unit, and the screen is up under the lid. If your screen is plugged like ours was, it could be causing your problem.