Need product advise

Ok guys first let me get one thing clear. I don't know much about ram or wire edm. But I have had several requests by people for ER16 or ER20 collet chucks with 20mm shanks. I tell them I don't stock them but I can order them. The last guy told me if I can get 20mm straight shank collet chucks with a pin in the shank for a normal price I can sell a lot of them to ram edm users. I saw one ER20 collet chuck with a side pin and a er20 collet set for $1000. Shoot, I can have that made with a side pin for at least $700 less. My question is this, Is this product needed? Is 20mm shank the most popular for ram edms? How long should be the shank? Can someone give me details on the side pin? What dia? where is it located? What size collet system, er11,er16,er20,er25,er32??? Thank you in advance for your help.

I can not answer your question as far as dimensions. I can tell you to look at System 3R edm tooling. May have a spec sheet. I know that the are or were very popular a few years back. There are copys of this same design sold by other companies. I don't know about patent or copyright infringment if you could sell these. Something you would have to look into. I would like to have some for my edm but the true toolholder(fixture) are not cheap. 20mm Shank is the normal I believe. Collet size is I think like ER 11 and Er 16. I think there would be enough people interested for a reasonable priced tooling. I believe that 20mm shanks are limited to smaller sized electrodes. The pin serves to orignate the shank from one holder to the next for machining of the electrode and edming. As far use goes I think those on the cutting edge, are now using a different sytle of holders. Or at least the EDM holder companies are trying to sale it to them.
One word of thought on this is alot of the tooling for WEDM is stainless steel.

Please let us know what you decide to do. Might be interest my self.

Muskrat

I have seen that style of tooling become less and less popular. Standard 20mm tooling goes for scrap money on Ebay lately, although I never really noticed if any of them were collet ends.

The 3R Mini/Macro/Combi chucks seem to be taking over. It's a lower profile design and lends itself to automatic toolchanges better than the straight shank design ever did. They're also more accurate and consistant than the straight shanks.

MitsTech is correct, the 20mm Tooling system has been eclipsed by so-called Pallet Systems (Macro, Erowa, etc.) In most cases these days, 20mm tooling (also known as Mini) is used in manual EDM Machines. The Collet holders 3R offers comes in two versions, one takes ER20 and the other takes ER16. They are expensive.

The shank should be around 50mm long, to allow the collet holder to be clamped by the Hydraulic Chuck properly.

The collet holder should also have a through hole and some kind of sealing device to allow dielectric to be delivered through the electrode without leaking out the slits in the collets.

The cross pin is used for radial position which is often not needed if the collet holder is used to hold a copper tube for hole burning. If a piece of electrode material is to be shaped, however, then there would be a need to hold your radial location when you go from the mill to the EDM.

I hope this helps.

Jack