CERATIZIT USA Inc. has released the WTX High-Feed Drill, which the company says is the first four-fluted drill on the market. CERATIZIT also says the drill’s four effective cutting edges increase precision, productivity and service life.
The pyramid geometry of the WTX encourages aggressive and precise drilling performance, with the company reporting the drill achieves positioning accuracy of 0.03 mm and excellent RCMX Insert centering properties. CERATIZIT also says high levels of drilling quality, hole tolerance, surface finish and positioning accuracy increase component quality, to the extent that there is no need for potential reworking. Additionally, low burr formation when entering and exiting the hole reduces the need for time-consuming subsequent deburring.
The four-flute design of the WTX enables high feeds in steel processing, as well as secure and quick chip removal. The distribution of cutting force to four cutting edges should result in longer service life, while the four continuous spiral-through coolant holes provide enhanced cooling of each cutting edge to also prolong tool life and reduce costs.
CERATIZIT says its Dragonskin DPX14S coating on the WTX protects the drill and further increases tool life, VCMT Insert cutting speeds and process reliability. Dragonskin utilizes TiAIN nanolayer coating with a .35 coefficient of friction and allows for maximum application temperatures of 1832ºF.
Big Kaiser introduces hydraulic chucks for Swiss-type lathes, said to be the first Swiss-type tooling improvement offered by the company for in more than 30 years. These toolholders use a single wrench, enabling quick change of the cutting tools on a gang slide.
Often used for mass production of small items such as automobile parts, watch parts, medical parts, communication and digital equipment parts, Swiss-type lathes WNMG Insert have many fixed and rotating tools operating in a narrow space, making it difficult to replace a cutting tool inside the machine. To minimize machine downtime and increase operator safety, the hydraulic chucks use a hex wrench that requires only 2 or 3 turns for both clamping and unclamping.
To maintain good repeatability, once a hydraulic chuck is centered, the runout does not vary, even if a cutting tool is changed repeatedly, according to the company. Runout of less than 3 microns at 4×D can be achieved. With clamping ranging between 4 and 8 mm, the chuck promotes high-precision cutting. The company says that the chucks are long-lasting and that rigidity is improved by the short projection length and dual pressure points. The chucks have a standard pipe thread for coolant-through connection and are available TNMG Insert for Citizen and Star machines with ¾" or 22 mm straight shank.
“Walnuts are cool,” Shawn Wentzel says with a shrug when asked why he decided to plant 7,000 walnut trees on his property in Lodi, California. Now two years old, the CCMT Insert orchard is a growing side business. Surrounded by rolling plains and vineyards, it begins at the back door of his primary source of income: an old horse-barn-turned-machine-shop with plenty of space for additional milling and turning equipment to complement the current stable of six machine tools.
He named the shop Wenteq, and with revenue growing at approximately 10 percent per year, prospects for filling the rest of the 15,000-square-foot space seem bright. The newest technology addition is a robot to load and unload various parts for automotive and agricultural equipment from a turning center. With Mr. Wentzel opting to do much of the legwork, integrating the robot is a work in progress. No matter. As was the case with the walnut trees, he sees no barrier in his lack of automation-integration experience. “There&TCGT Insertrsquo;s nothing like doing it yourself,” the 36-year-old says, articulating the independent spirit that first led him to turn his machining hobby into a business nearly 15 years ago. “What can anyone learn in school that they can’t learn on the shop floor?”
This inclination to make his own way is one reason why Mr. Wentzel says he appreciates the open-architecture Thinc-OSP CNCs on the shop’s five Okuma machine tools. These controls’ application programming interface (API), which is essentially the set of tools and resources ?used to integrate with? the CNC and develop functionality for it, is based on the same Microsoft Windows operating platform that drives many personal computers. That means the CNCs can use much of the same software as any other Windows-based computer, including downloadable apps such as the GPS navigators, heart-rate monitors and weather trackers common to consumer mobile devices.
Of course, the apps Okuma offers are designed to make life easier in a CNC machine shop. Many are available for free via the machine tool builder’s online app store. This store has been growing steadily since its launch in 2014, thanks in part to the active participation of shops like Wenteq. Whenever Mr. Wentzel has had an idea—whenever there is something he wished his CNC could do—he says he likely can make it happen by asking Okuma distributor Gosiger Automation to develop an app.
He is not alone. According to Okuma, many apps now available for download originated with end users like Mr. Wentzel. In this way, the company essentially invites its customers to participate in the development of new CNC functionality. Mr. Wentzel was an early enthusiast of this approach, and Wenteq became an early proving ground after the app store’s debut. “When an app came out, we were never scared to throw it on a machine and try it out,” he says.
These small programs all help Mr. Wentzel and his three shopfloor employees avoid making mistakes or wasting time, he says. For instance, the shop does not have an offline tool presetter (not yet, anyway), so many of the most commonly used apps help streamline the manual entry of compensating offsets at machine controls. Others provide basic machine monitoring functionality. Here are five examples of apps the shop finds valuable, two of which were created at Mr. Wentzel’s request:
This app enables inexperienced operators to edit common variables in the control’s parameters section without making mistakes. (Common variables are used to store offsets, part counts and other temporary data that is specific to a particular part program.) “I don’t want employees going into the CNC’s parameters section,” Mr. Wentzel explains. “The common variable section is one page away from a machine system location. If something were to be changed on this page, the machine could crash.”
Instead, Variable Manager presents only the relevant common variables, which can be pulled from the CAM program or defined by Mr. Wentzel when he programs a job. All variable slots can be clearly labeled for convenience and efficiency, and a “revert” function can quickly restore previous values in the event of an error.
On the shop’s palletized horizontal machining center (HMC), Variable Manager makes it easy for even inexperienced operators to change tools for a new job without interrupting production. To facilitate this, the machine’s cycle includes a “dummy pallet” associated with a CAM program that does nothing more than initiate a macro to touch-probe the newly changed tools. Any time before this pallet cycles in, the operator simply opens Variable Manager, inputs the new tool numbers and clicks “set” to initiate a probing cycle for every changed tool. In short, tools can be probed whenever it is convenient rather than immediately upon inserting them in the 146-position automatic toolchanger (ATC). “It puts only what’s relevant in front of you,” Mr. Wentzel says about Variable Manager. “You just type in the tool numbers and click once.” (Tool numbers generally correspond to the number of the slot in the ATC—that is, tool 1 goes into slot 1).
Variable Manager also enables adjusting a machine’s schedule on-the-fly by simply changing the variable associated with part count. Capability to change part counts from the floor, while the machine runs and without editing the program, is particularly useful for the shop’s bar-fed turning centers, Mr. Wentzel says. As is the case with HMC tool offsets, there is no need to navigate through the CNC to find the variable associated with part count. There is little risk of changing the wrong variable or altering a parameter that should not be changed.
Developed by Gosiger at Mr. Wentzel’s request, Manual Data Input (MDI) Tool Call is used for the shop’s LB-3000 lathe. With a subspindle and a Y-axis turret that accommodates as many as 96 tools for both front- and backworking operations, setting offsets on this machine can be complicated. Adding to the confusion is the fact that as many as eight tools can be stacked in the same turret station (four for the main spindle and four for the subspindle). Each requires its own offset, but tools stacked in this way are more difficult to probe because they do not line up with the centerline of the spindle at the turret’s home position. Jogging the turret into position along the Y axis requires either moving it manually (and carefully) or entering a series of coordinate moves into the CNC (again, carefully).
MDI Tool Call reduces this task to just a few keystrokes. The operator simply opens the app, enters the tool-station number, designates which tool requires a new offset, and presses “start” to move the Y axis into the correct position. “I was typing in the same stuff over and over again, and I thought ‘This is dumb,’” Mr. Wentzel recalls about the app’s development. “I approached Gosiger with an idea to make it easy for anyone to do it fast, and without any experience or knowledge.”
Wenteq’s work sometimes demands changing tool offsets frequently, sometimes between every part. “We had a tight-tolerance project a few months ago in which we were measuring every part to check for insert wear and then changing offsets as needed,” Mr. Wentzel says. “Fat-finger it one time in a situation like that, and you can lose a part.”
There is little risk of that as of just a few months prior to Modern Machine Shop’s visit late last year, when Mr. Wentzel pitched Gosiger on the functionality that became the Easy Adjust app. This app presents operators with a simple interface consisting of four slider bars, each corresponding to the offset for a specific cutting tool. Clicking the “plus” and “minus” buttons adjusts the offset by a prespecified amount (changing this amount requires a password). As the operator adjusts the buttons, the bar changes color depending on how close the adjustment gets to prespecified minimum and maximum limits. Limiting the display to four offsets helps keep things simple, he adds, noting that few jobs require adjusting more than that. This simplicity enables even the least-experienced shopfloor employees to be productive while they learn, and above all, to avoid mistakes and scrapping parts.
Around the time the Okuma app store debuted in 2014, Mr. Wentzel had been seeking a simple, affordable solution for basic machine monitoring. “For one system I considered, the company wanted thousands of dollars plus a monthly fee,” he recalls, “but we don’t need all that functionality. We’re small enough that we don’t need deep utilization information or fancy dashboards with a bunch of lines. We were just looking for a simple, at-a-glance view of machine status.”
As it turned out, this functionality was available for free at the Okuma app store. Since then, basic status information for every machine tool has been displayed on two 50-inch TV monitors that are visible throughout the shop. Green indicates a machine that is running, orange indicates idle equipment and red denotes a potential problem.
Mr. Wentzel says setup was easy, with the free apps pushing status information through the same Wi-Fi connection used to link machines and send part programs. An Intel Compute Stick—essentially, a mini Windows 10 computer that plugs into a USB port—installed in each of the monitors receives the data from the machines. Mr. Wentzel can also view the data on his smartphone.
This is all possible thanks to MTConnect, an open-source communications protocol that facilitates interconnection and communication among CNC machine tools and other manufacturing equipment. Specifically, Wenteq uses three apps: MTConnect Agent/Adapter, which provides the basic MTConnect communications functionality; MTConnect Display, which scans a shop network for compatible devices (in this case, the Compute Stick) to make installation plug-and-play; and MTConnect Display Mobile, which provides the mobile phone connection.
Access to status displays is not Mr. Wentzel’s only means of monitoring machine tools. While walking the floor of the 2018 International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), he received a call with a distinct ringtone, one assigned to a specific entry in his contact list. On the other end was not a person, but one of his machines, reporting a problem. This simple capability is thanks to the free Machine Alert app, which sends CNC status information and screen shots via email or text whenever certain user-specified conditions are met.
Back in 2014, Mr. Wentzel had to download every app. Now, many come pre-installed on the CNCs of new Okuma machines, including MTConnect Agent/Adapter, apps that track maintenance schedules, and apps that calculate overall run time and remaining run time, among other capabilities.
Suhner’s EconoMaster drilling units are suitable for multiple materials, including light metal, wood, composite, plastic and foam. The drilling unit features low power and air consumption, an adjustable motor housing, adjustable total stroke ranging to 4", a hydraulic feed control cylinder, a J33 taper spindle end, Carbide Milling Inserts 0" to ½" drill chucks, electric front and rear position limit switches, a belt Cermet Inserts tensioner, and a chrome-plated quill.
Other features include adjustable feed stroke of ½" to 3"; 400-lb. thrust at 85 psi; operating pressures to 110 psi; TEFC/IP56 protection; standard 230V/460V power; concentricity of 0.002" TIR; speeds ranging to 9,600 RPM; and an air connection retract/advance of ¼" to 27 NPT.
EconoMaster drilling units can be supplied with an adjustable stand, inline vertical configuration and a range of spindle and toolholder options.
The Carbide Inserts Website: https://www.estoolcarbide.com/product/factory-wholesale-cnc-lathe-cutting-tools-solid-carbide-inserts-milling-inserts-bdmt11t308er-jt/
I recently visited Sandvik Coromant's headquarters in Sandviken, Sweden, (and insert production facility in nearby Gimo), during a global press event with editors from 20 countries. 2017 marks the 75th anniversary of Sandvik Coromant, so the company wanted to present a few new recent developments in tooling technology, three of which I think I succinctly documented in this tweet I posted at my @MMS_Derek handle during the event:
Two of these I’d call technologies “for the now,” while the other is a technology “for WNMG Insert the future.”
Let’s start with one “for the now.” Prime Turning, literally and figuratively, is a genuinely new approach to turning. For essentially, well, ever, turning has been performed with the part rotating and the stationary cutter moving longitudinally down the Z axis (or X and Z axes for profiling) toward the chuck. Then, once that pass was completed, the tool would retract and repeat similar passes. Using appropriate tooling and some new programming techniques, Prime Tooling can perform turning in multiple directions using the same tool: longitudinal turning (toward the chuck or away from it), facing and profiling operations.
Sandvik worked with MasterCAM/CNC Software to develop programming techniques as part of the Prime Turning code generator. On the surface, it might not seem too Machining Carbide Inserts terribly difficult to simply run the tool in the other direction. However, it did present some programming and tool geometry challenges. In fact, Mark Albert is currently working on a story for our June issue that will provide more detail about all this. For example, it will explain why lower cutting pressure during passes made away from the chuck enables higher cut data and material removal rates during roughing. (This operation creates thinner, wider chips and spreads the load and heat away from the nose radius.) In addition, as cutting is performed in the direction moving away from a shoulder, there is no danger of chip jamming, which is common during conventional longitudinal turning toward the chuck.
While I don’t want to steal his thunder here, this video includes example cuts demonstrating the concept.
The company has also developed its CoroPlus tool and software platform to facilitate big data/IIoT efforts (you might have learned about these a few months ago at IMTS). One tool example is the CoroBore, which uses an embedded sensor system to enable wireless, automatic fine adjustment of the boring tool’s cutting diameter to speed and simplify setups. Another is the company’s line of Silent Tools, providing in-cut process monitoring and optimization for tools using connected, damped adapters for internal turning of deep features.
In addition, Sandvik’s Promos 3+ data collector monitors tools and operations in real time to help ensure machining safety. Developed by Prometec, Promos 3+ enables on-site or cloud-based monitoring to prevent collisions before they happen, stopping a machine if a tool is missing, breaks or collides with a part or fixture.
Another part of the company’s IIoT offerings is tooling design and planning connectivity with CoroPlus ToolGuide, in which tool and cutting data recommendations can be integrated into the CAD/CAM environment, and ToolLibrary, which is built on the ISO 13399 standard that is open for all cutting tool suppliers.
As for the future, Sandvik is combining its knowledge of additive manufacturing powder metallurgy (through the Sandvik Materials Technology division) and cutting tool design knowledge for AM-grown parts (through the Sandvik Machining Solutions division), bridging these with its new Additive Manufacturing Center. This facility uses powder-bed fusion and binder jetting equipment to develop appropriate AM processes to create functional metal parts and explore new concepts in cutting tools.
For example, the AM-grown end mill body shown in one of the photos above is 60 percent lighter than the same design machined via conventional means. One benefit is lighter weight can facilitate higher spindle speeds. The company says testing of some AM-grown tool designs like this one is currently underway, and it hopes to provide test data/details soon (stay tuned).
All of these new tooling developments demonstrate how the company is leveraging its machining and manufacturing experience and knowledge with an eye toward developing new advances in the future. In fact, Sandvik continues to introduce an average of six new tool designs each day. Many of these developments also serve as an example of how the increasing integration of new software technology, as shown with those used for the Prime Turning and CoroPlus platforms, will continue to impact how shops approach machining in the coming years.
