can you recommend a brand ? I have looked but had little luck , we do have a tech coming in the new year I will ask him as well .

What brand and type of coolant filtering system are most running on their turning centers and what kind of life are you getting out of them ?? We are currently running a water filter that is from American Plumbing and they are lasting maybe a month before the are imploded and falling apart . Our coolant is from Oemeta and I find it very hard or rubber products and other plastic related parts . Our pump pressure is between 100psi and roughly 130psi depending on the machine .

http://grimsmo-knives.myshopify.com/ this may help and may not , but they do knives using vacuum plates .

Kennametal may have a service as well we have a plastic container bin here from them we throw our old inserts and endmills in .

Bend Tech offers a sheet metal program if you can not get it to work using MC .

as stated clean up and re oil when procedure is done I have machined materials that are a lot for abrasive on the ways then wood , Induction hardened super chrome is one material , the chrome is murder on ways , same could be said for cast iron , the dust from that gets into every little spot , contaminates the coolant etc.

It was not a jab at your skill level , just pointing out that there are lots of highly skilled guys who don't know everything about what they are doing , not a negative thing just a fact about today . I run and set-up twin spindle turning centers , and have only been in the CNC end of things fulltime for 2+ yrs , prior to that(25+yrs) I was a manual guy in a jobbing shop bouncing from machine to machine getting stuff done . Last shop I was working at, had guys that could draw , program and set-up machines yet had no skills on trimming the fat off a program and making the most out of it .

reality is trades are filled with skilled people who don't know every aspect or code , some programmers never set-up or run a machine so all the codes are just letters and numbers they see on a screen .

I was using Deboer for manual work at home on my machines , but as stated they are not the best on steel . I have noticed the cutting edge breaks down and the corners are always chipping , switched to a no name house brand thru a local supplier and really like them . So far none issues on 1045 PTG shafting .

Yes and no they have most of the market due to North American companies moving their businesses over there to make maximum profits . There are two small shops that still produce molds locally to my area , and they both have felt the crunch from the offshore supply , 1 actually is making molds to send over there for parts to be produced . The other supports a few businesses that do injection molds . I think both these shops stay alive due to the fact they will produce a mold and then produce the parts for you as well .

friend of mine is a mold maker and another guy I know owns a shop that does injection molds , they both rely on solidworks for design and MC for programming . as for machinery the shop my buddy works at is still using machines that where on the floor when he started there 30yrs ago .

x2 to what Allan said , IMO too much work involved to rigidly support that part with a expanding mandrel.

so basically you are wanting to cut a full radius corner Woodruff key seat ?

curious as to way the feed rate for the g3 is higher then the g1 most of the programs I have seen the tool path slows down on arcs and increases on the straights

aahh double post

how small of a thread do you thread mill ?? my co-worker has done tons of thread milling in his day and stated the used it for threads over 1" .

CHICK has a similar set-up for 4th axis set-up , you can choose a model based on your machine .

http://www.morsecuttingtools.com/cgi/CGP2SRIM?PMITEM=23304&PARTPG=CGP2SRFC&PAMENU=Content-type:%20text/html

yeah stagger tooth NPT taps can work really well , used them a lot on 316SS and Aluminum Bronze parts , way less cutting pressure to produce a quality thread . and I have to agree , to do it right using taps you have to use one source for taps and stick with that source , each NPT tap brand I have used have all had shuttle differences in design .

biggest issue I have come across with the cheap vices is the casting quality of the nut is typically pure crap , worked with many offshore KURT copies and they have all failed either in the main casting or the wedge nut cracks in half . one thing I did notice when we where looking for vices for the Robodrill is that the Chick,s where a way better deal for a double vice , plus the Chick has the quick change jaws allowing quicker set-up time between jobs . In the 2 years they have been on the machine we have not removed them once . GS makes a decent vice as well , and AUTO-WELL makes a decent vice , worked with both over the years and have AUTO-WELL in my shop at home . http://www.autowell.com.tw/products.php

I have always been told not to spot or center drill a hole to be drilled with a carbide drill , reason being all the initial cutting pressure is on the outside edge of the drill rather then being distributed across the cutting edge from the center out . we run Sandvik and Iscar solid carbide drills with thru coolant we drill 303 ss or 6061-t6 all day and have drills that regularly get into the thousands for parts counts before being rotated out

check out a water jet cutting , plasma cutting or any type of shop that does profile cutting , usually they have small batches of material and can cut to your needs . last shop I was at did water jet cutting and we always had crops or small plate profiles in stock , same deal when I worked at a shop that did profile cutting with oxy/act .

Hey Colin Thanks for the tips and information , I will save the notes for later use should we go back to the vacuum set-up . Truthfully the 3 double vice set-up has been KING for us , we just swap the vice tops and we run 6 different products with this set-up including the parts that where vacuum fixture only .

similar set-up to what we run , we run close to 20K spindle rpm with these on a regular basis , granted we are not using any tooling larger than 3/8" . we also use double "A" collets with the chucks and have not had any tooling come loose .

nice to see some are getting the vacuum tables to work , we spent weeks trying to get our set-up to work and in the end ended up going to Chick double vices .