Iljin Diamond’s Epsilon Tungsten Carbide rods and blanks are used Indexable Threading Insert to produce end mills, drills and reamers as well as micro drill and router bits. Available sizes range from 1.2 to 32 mm in diameter with 320-mm standard, unground length. Options include straight or helical coolant holes and pre-forming. Manufactured via an extrusion and one-step sinter-HIP process, the materials are constructed of ultra-fine WC powder from 0.2 to 0.5 μm. ? The company also offers its custom IPOL polycrystalline diamond (PCD), which is designed for hardness, wear resistance, high thermal conductivity and uniform wear in all Thread Cutting Insert directions. The material is useful for machining non-ferrous metals, aluminum alloys, tungsten carbides, plastics and more. Also available is IBON, the company’s polycrystalline cubic boron nitride. The material is manufactured with fine-grained and isotropic structure cbn and designed for matching ferrous materials, including cast irons, hardened steels, powder metals and super alloys. ? Two new PCBN grades, the high-content SB950 and the low-content SB50+, are designed via high pressure and high temperature technology and powdered metallurgy technology. Engineered for thermal resistance and wear resistance, SB950 is designed for high-speed processing of cast iron, CV joint and sintered alloys. SB50+ is designed to resist wear and is useful for machining hardened steels.
Speed. For production companies, this simple word can mean the difference between keeping customers—and losing them. Today, high quality parts and prototypes that can be produced with increased speed and at lower costs are what customers are demanding. While at one time, 16-18 weeks was the typical tool-build schedule, now product turnaround times of four to 12 weeks are the norm. This puts extra pressure on toolmakers and design engineers who must struggle to keep up.
RCO Engineering, founded in 1976 and located in Roseville, Michigan, manufactures plastic parts, prototypes and production tools primarily for the transportation industry. It is one of these companies trying to speed up its processes. Recently, the company decided to Carbide Drilling Inserts invest in new technology in order to meet this goal. To do this, RCO purchased new products for high-speed milling, EDM and tool cutting. However, one of the major components of this technological upgrade was Quick-Split software from Cimatron Limited (Livonia, Michigan).
"Quick-Split helps us gain tool building efficiencies and reduce tool timing," says Norm Star, marketing manager at RCO Engineering. "It allows us to go from the early stages of receiving the data to engineering what the tool will look like more quickly. In an industry where our customers’ goals are to shorten product development cycles and trim the time out of the process anywhere and everywhere, Quick-Split is a competitive advantage."
Mr. Star explains that by reducing setup time, Quick-Split allows RCO to "get Cemented Carbide Inserts to the tool faster." "The more complicated the job, the larger and more complex the part geometry, the greater the benefit there is from using Quick-Split," he says. "We recognized this immediately when we saw it demonstrated."
With Quick-Split, moldmakers can determine the parting lines in 3D quickly and accurately. They also can find the most efficient split option using any CAD system. This helps to free up moldmakers’ time on the shop floor, which means increased productivity for RCO. Since using Quick-Split, RCO has been able to cut up to 50 percent off tooling delivery time.
"RCO has the perfect type of application for Quick-Split software with its large, complex parts," notes Eyal Dolev, chief executive officer of Cimatron Technologies North America. "What really makes the product useful at RCO is the instantaneous visual feedback it provides of the splitting and mold design process. The software can even provide splitting capabilities if original data passed to it is not 100 percent accurate."
Phil Morganroth, general manager of RCO Engineering, agrees. "The function of setting up the data and establishing the parting line requires our most skilled people. It’s not something we can put a ‘junior’ person on. Therefore, the longer the process takes, the more it ties up our most skilled people. One of Quick-Split’s benefits is that it reduces the time that our best people have to spend on setup tasks."
Quick-Split is also easy to use, it has a friendly interface, and it has only a small amount of training time. RCO was able to get the product up and running in a very short time.
"We have quite a bit of interaction with Cimatron on both product development and support issues," says Mr. Morganroth. "Cimatron is very good about getting input from us on our needs and comments on future product developments. It is extremely responsive when technical support is needed."
Today RCO is able to meet the customer demand of four to 12 week tool development time, thanks in part to Quick-Split Software.
Pinpoint Laser Systems offers a 2D laser microgage for precision measuring, machine alignment, calibration and other industrial applications. Roll and web lines; CNC cutting and milling equipment; lathes; stamping presses; injection molding machines; extrusion systems; and other production equipment can be checked and aligned for improved operating efficiency and reduced downtime. The TCGT Insert gage is compact, easy to set up and use right on the factory floor, the company says.
The gage combines a compact laser transmitter with a receiver and digital display. As the laser beam moves across the receiver in a vertical or horizontal path, the display provides a reading of the motion, accurate to 0.0001". This product will operated over a distance of 180 ft. with a bright, red beam that is quickly adaptable to many industrial applications. Instructions on the display guide the operator through the alignment project. Several accessories allow for alignment of straightness, runout, parallelism, squareness, roll and web alignment, shaft and bore alignment, flatness measuring and more.
The two-axis laser microgage operates on batteries, and all components are machines of solid aluminum with a hard anodized coating TNGG Insert for wear resistance. A sealed push-button keypad and large LCD display make the gage easy and convenient to use in demanding industrial environments, the company says.?
Live tooling often features a sealed-bearing design to prevent coolant from entering the grease packing, but live tooling from Cincinnati, Ohio-based Planet Products uses the exact opposite approach. In fact, coolant is fed directly to the bearings to prevent overheating and tool failure during high-volume, lengthy-cycle CNC turning operations.
“If a shop produces items with long cycle times or high volumes, then thermal growth will usually occur in the toolhead,” explains Mike Thompson, lathe supervisor at Micro-Tronics (Tempe, Arizona). “This is because the sealed bearings in the toolhead tend to overheat during continuous use or under heavy loads, and that can cause serious problems.” Mr. Thompson says, Micro-Tronics’ precision machine shop has experienced a variety of sealed-bearing-related problems in the production of metal valves and related products for the aerospace and automotive industries. Among these problems was thermal growth, which caused offset deviations that adversely affected workpiece tolerances. In another instance, metal chips entered the toolhead after the bearing seal had failed.
To eliminate these issues, Micro-Tronics acquired a coolant-fed toolholder from Planet for each of its new Okuma LB300 lathes. Planet’s live-tool design for turret lathe applications uses a continuous flow of filtered machine coolant to lubricate and cool the bearings, reducing thermal growth. Unlike conventional bearings, coolant-fed bearings do not rely on seal integrity or the lubricant packing to operate normally in high-capacity conditions, the company says. Instead, the filtered coolant that externally cools and lubricates the live tools and workpieces flows through the tool to keep the bearings cool and maintain accuracy. Mr. Thompson adds that the coolant washes metal chips and other contaminants away from the bearing assembly before they cause damage. By keeping bearings cool and free of debris, the shop was able to increase tool life, and thus, increase productivity.
Another way that shops can increase productivity in high-capacity applications is by increasing production speed. Low-cost overseas competition makes this an especially important goal for Buku Performance Products, a small manufacturer of aftermarket components for radio-controlled vehicles. Dave Maslar, CEO of the Gambrills, Maryland-based business, turned to Planet to find a solution that could improve aluminum-cutting productivity on the company’s Puma 240 MB turret lathe from Doosan.
Cycle time for that aluminum component was approximately 6.5 minutes, more than four of which were occupied by cutting deep slots with a 3/32-inch end mill, Mr. Maslar explains. “The live-tool turret on my machine is limited to 5,000 rpm. That was the limiting factor for the time it was taking to process these components,” he says. To increase efficiency, Buku adopted Planet’s line of “speeder” over-speed heads, which feature a gear-up ratio that enables the tool to spin faster than the turret drive. For instance, a user with a 4,000-rpm turret could potentially increase turret speed to 12,000 to 15,000 rpm with a sped-up ratio. At Buku, the over-speed head reduced cycle time by more than 2 minutes. Even though the cycle time placed a heavy demand on the tool, reliability and accuracy were maintained, Mr. Maslar says.
The over-speed heads also feature coolant-fed bearings to reduce tool failure. “The bearings are running fast, and they are running for a long time,” Mr. Malsar says. “But having the coolant lubricate the bearings eliminated any concerns we could have had regarding overusing the live tool for that amount of time.” He adds that externally lubricated and cooled bearings can have tighter tolerances, which improves the runout characteristic of the bearing. Even though there is an upper limit to how tight the bearing tolerance can be if the tool is run for a long time, High Feed Milling Insert he attributes significant runout improvement to the active, external cooling and lubrication of the bearings in the tool head.
“That is a very important result because I’m running a 3/32-inch, three-flute end mill, and the feed per revolution is distributed among three cutting teeth,” he explains. Even the slightest bit of run-out can cause one tooth to substantially over-cut, wear faster and fail more quickly than it should. From a tool cost perspective, that might not be a big deal, he says, but from a production downtime standpoint, that can be very expensive. “So far, we’ve not broken one end mill, and that reflects cutting times of 20 to 30 hours on a single end mill.”
While Buku cuts aluminum, Mr. Maslar says that shops that cut very hard materials should have an even greater PVD Coated Insert appreciation for the tool runout improvements because runout is usually a significant issue in pushing the limits of a hard milling operation.
Some programmers shy away from using custom macros because they feel these macros make it more difficult to restart a program from the middle of a complex machining operation. This concern can often be overcome with a little planning. Indeed, custom macros sometimes make it easier to restart the program and run from the middle of a cutting tool’s machining operation.
The technique in this article was inspired by Chad Kluth of Mid Valley Industries in Kaukuana, Wisconsin. I was helping him resolve a different issue in a Carbide Turning Inserts bolt-circle hole-machining custom macro. I include it here since it is relevant to our discussion.
Kluth’s application involved machining very large and tough 4140 steel components used in the mining industry. He needed to drill as many as 100 holes, each 2 inches in diameter, around a bolt-circle pattern into a round face/flange to a 6-inch depth. As you can imagine, tool wear and tool breakage are big issues. Even a drill with new inserts may not make it all the way through the cycle without wearing out — and the drill could be 90 holes into the cycle when it does wear out. To make matters worse, a hard inclusion in the raw material could cause the drill to break at any time.
Kluth uses a universal bolt-circle custom macro capable of performing several kinds of hole-machining operations, including drilling, standard tapping, rigid tapping, reaming and counterboring. The original issue had to do with rigid tapping. Being a “universal” custom macro, the M29 command needed to ignore rigid tapping if the machine was performing any other operation. To solve this issue, we used “vacant” local variables.
As for skipping holes, an argument in the calling command specifies the number of holes to skip. For example, if the drill wears out during the 90th hole, the user needs to set this argument to 89. We used the K-word (L-word with older FANUC CNCs) in the canned cycle command to specify whether the machine should skip a hole. If K is set to zero (K0), the hole is skipped. If K is set to one (K1), the hole is machined.
Here is a sample program CCGT Insert containing an example calling command:
These are the mandatory arguments that must be in the calling command:
These are the arguments that are only required in special cases:
Here is the custom macro:
Here is a guide to the bolded items in the custom macro:
