HAAS Tram Problem.

I have a question for all of the CNC Mill operators out there who have had the unfortunate experience of crashing the head of their mill. How bad have you crashed and did it knock your head out of tram? I am particularly interested in HAAS machines because that is what I have (VF2). I bought the machine brand new in July of this year. The first job I ran in it went well, the second, not so well. I had to stop the machine in the middle of a program to check something and was trying to restart it in the same place and failed; the result was the head rapiding down and the tool holder smacking the plate I was working on. The plate already had a drill hole in it so the drill bit went right through and the collet holder took the brunt of the impact. Besides the nice little bend in my .125 O1 plate there was no visible damage anywhere. I should state the collet holder was a Royal ER11 extended shank type holder. It is not a rugged tool holder at all. Being new to this I went on with my work thinking all was fine, then I started to notice taper in my cuts and decided to sweep my table with an indicator. X was off .001 and Y was off.002 so I called the distributor that I bought it from and told them what had happened. To start, it took them a week to come out during which time I had jobs backing up because I didn’t want to use the machine. Then they work on it for three days and still can’t get it straight, at which time I tell them I need to be getting some jobs done and I need it up and running. So they offer to shim the spindle and then come back and fix it correctly when I get the jobs out. I agree. One week later I get a bill for the job for three days labor $2,600 and three days travel time $600 now the real kicker here is that the service person lives down the street from my shop. This is some nerve.

So have any of you had this happen to you, keep in mind the table was not moving sideways, the head was just coming straight down. Should this have knocked my tram out and then, how the heck does Y get so far out?

Thanks
Ed

These figures that you measured, what diameter were you spanning with the indicator? A 2" circle or a 12" circle? Was the machine ever levelled carefully when you set it up, and the table trammed?

Did they get it shimmed so that the tram is correct?

I guess that shims are normal between the head casting and the spindle cartridge. When I rebuilt my spindle, I made a definite effort to determine where I could place 2 shims about 120° apart so that the cartidge has 3 definite points of contact when the bolts are secured. Single shim = wobbly spindle cartridge, theoretically

I assume the tech used a granite AA master square to check z axis squareness in zx and yz planes first. Then on a test bar you should check spindle squareness in zx and yz planes before determining errors. Tram should be the widest circle possible. determine what moved before you get carried away.

The $200 a day travel plus the time might be great if your in Maine but it sucks in CT.

Thanks for the replies, the span was an 8" circle. He did use some kind of large (12") angle plate. How good it is; I'm not sure, it came from W.W. Grainger. WILLEO I'm not sure what you mean by a test bar. If you mean a gage pin in a collet, I have done that but my brand new Kennametal collets have a .001 wobble in them, Kennametal thinks this is fine, I think its crap.

Ed

get a real test bar, it has a CAT/ BT XX taper to match your machine. Most are 10" length for 40 taper and about 2" od. They are ground concentric, pulled in iwth the retention knob just like a regular tool, and give a long stable axis to inspect, I think my 40 taper bar is a Lyndex/Nikken. Most guys who align professionally have a granite master square ( 0.0002 max deviation from square in 12 inches I think is what grade AA is certified to) instead of steel or cast iron. Sometimes you will see 0.001-0.002 runout at 10" even on new spindles, it may not all be the holder.

ETA - not sure of your tolerances but 0.002 in a 12" circle would not affect most general machining jobs much, I'd run it until you got a 2-3 day window to make it better.

I had an experience with my SL10 that involved Selway charging me for 19 hours to assemble my turret. That also included 13 hours for them to assemble, disassemble and reassemble due to their error. They also wanted to charge me I think it was in the neighborhood of $13 or $1400 travel.
I bought three machines last year. Guess what two of them weren't.....
Personaly, I'll never own another Haas product. Which is really too bad, because they are a good bang for the buck but the service is attrocious. I had to threaten Selway with court to get them to see reason. Never again.

Then they work on it for three days and still can’t get it straight, at which time I tell them I need to be getting some jobs done and I need it up and running. So they offer to shim the spindle and then come back and fix it correctly when I get the jobs out. I agree. One week later I get a bill for the job for three days labor $2,600 and three days travel time $600 now the real kicker here is that the service person lives down the street from my shop. This is some nerve.

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Sounds to me like you got taken by someone who does not know where to start with machine tool alignments..and since you dont know where to start, they got away with it.

PBMW, you seem to be a level headed guy and I've paid close attention to your posts on the big problems you've had with Selway in Washington as that all happened as I was talking to a salesman about buying my VF-2SS.

I certainly can't blame you for dealing with Selway anymore, but I wanted to go on record as saying the Selway in Union City, Ca has been outstanding to deal with and has gone over and above for me. As much as I'd like to, I won't go into details about what they did, but suffice it to say I'm VERY happy with their service and ethics. I can honestly say that they put me before the allmighty dollar.

Matt,
I'm in the same boat as PBMW. I have had nothing but problems with Selway in WA. The first time was when they tried to charge me for 4 hours of travel time because the tech got really lost trying to find my shop, the travel time should have been 1 hour. They also tried to charge me for a warranty repair on that trip; it took months to get straightened out. The next time they tried to screw me was on a call to fix two problems. I agreed to give them one more chance at the request of Haas. One of the problems was a warranty repair and the other I was told would take less than two hours to fix. The warranty problem was never completed because the tech had no idea how to align the part. After working on it for four hours and noticing he had no idea what he was doing I asked him to address the other problem. The second problem was a tool turret that would not index to position four. He spent 5 hours on it and when he was done the turret would not index to any position. After 9 hours I told him we were done. He handed me a bill for $3000.00 and left me with a lathe that was not working at all. Prior to him working on it I could at least use it, just not turret position four. On the first problem they also tried to charge me for a part that was warranty item.

After the tech was gone I was able to finish fixing the first problem in about an hour. Haas sent me a replacement part to fix the second problem, which I installed myself. Haas has always been great to deal with. Their customer service has been exceptional. Selway talks a good talk they just can't come through in the end.

The other thing that irritates me about Selway is their labor rate; they charge $130.00 per hour. I called around and most other machine dealers and repair guys in this area are around $80.00 per hour. I'm a small shop and that rate really hurts. I have been looking at new machines and one of the first questions I ask is how much is their labor rate for service calls.

I hope you have better luck then PBMW and I have had. By the way Selway was great the first time they came to my shop for a simple warranty repair when the machine was new, they have just sucked every other time they tried to fix anything in my shop.

Mark Hockett

Mark, I know how you feel the HFO I'm dealing with charges $120.00 per hour. I find it funny that HAAS, a company that prides it self on its affordability allows its "outlets" to just rape the customer.

Now where are the stories about crashing your heads? What, no one wants to admit to it? I would like to get your thoughts on weather or not you think this would knock the tram out or not.

IMHO, no affect on tram. I have bashed some HMC's into tombstones at a pretty fair clip, hard enough to slip the ballscrew coupling and require home to be reset, with no affect on tram. I did have to disassemble a column, remove the moglice, and reshim to acheive tram on a large frame Cincinnati vertical. If I ever buy a new machine again my bet I'll be a damn difficult to please customer, as not only do I know how to align the machine, I have all the tools to do it now.

Ed,
I agree with some others in that .001 to .002 in a 12 inch circle is not too bad. You could run the machine as long as your tolerances aren't in the tenths.
Always slow the rapids WAY down when proofing a part. Learn how to interpet the "distance to go" on your screen. I feed hold the machine, look at the distance to go, then verify the distance looks about right in relation to the part, then cycle start again.
When you restarted the program, it sounds like something modal did not get picked up by the machine. Triple-check your restart procedures.
Good luck.

When an irresistible force is stopped by an unmovable object, anything can happen.
What happened is normally refered to as a wreck. When wrecks happen, things get thumped out of position. Things like machine squareness and tram are adversly effected. To say "no affect on tram" would be a stretch. I have seen "little" wrecks and when you finally see the tool involved and/or the part that was crushed and the anchor bolts that were sheared off, you can understand the "little" wreck was a very loud crash and complete machine checkout is in order.
IMHO.
Regards Walt..

Have you played with the leveling screws? you might be able to reduce or even eliminate the error altogether by re-leveling the machine.

Patriot,

I have crashed more times then I care to remember. Some have been doosies, while some not too bad.

IMHO the out of tram situation you are seeing is not too bad. (not perfect either ) I would want it fixed, but that would not stop me from doing any machining with that VMC.

The $120 an hr. that the Haas guys are charging is high as compared to $75 seen by freelance guys, but these guys are supposed to know their product. Hence, fix it faster.

I hope so since they will be here this afternoon to rebuild my turret on my lathe. They are charging me $125 an hour, with a 1 hour travel (20 min form the HFO) and 4 hour minimum.

Best of luck,

Doug.

Walt - rethinking my reply on no change in tram - I need to restate that it depends on machine construction. With pocketed and keyed bearing turcks, soundly mounted rails, etc. " world class iron" you can bash her good and not knock it out. On my Cinci verticals they have goofy set screw adjustments for setting and aligning certain things ( z axis cairrage angle in the XZ plane, angle of the table in the xy plane) and trucks are not pocketd and soundly mounted. a serious crash could misalign a cinci vertical, but "world class iron" minor crashes should not affect.

Ed,
I have crashed VF-2 few times (1 inch roughing end mill)and your .001 and .002 off seems quite big.It is .0008 on 10 inch circle on both Y and Y on mine.
Having a new machine you should have reading from the day your Haas was set up.I don't think you should have a problem from crashing straight down.
Question ,did your machine go into alarm?
Z servo or something of that nature?

We have eight of these Haas machines, I haven't seen them much closer than yours is now when they set them up new, We can get them a bit closer after a couple of months but for most of our parts it isn't any trouble anyhow.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but here is a reprint from a previous post, it bears repeating:

I called Selway and scheduled an in-shop training session for my Robodrill. So, the guy shows up, and right away I could tell that he knew his way around a CNC machine, but didn't know very much at all about my controller. So, he fumbles around the menus, asks me how to navigate here and there (remember he's training me at $150.00/hr.)and we progress through PC/machine communication after which I ask how to change the positon displays to read in inches instead of metric. He doesn't know how to do this so he calls back to the office to ask his manager, who tells him to change a parameter. So he changes the parameter, then we continue to run a test program that we just uploaded. While running the test program the Trainer tells me that the machine doesn't appear to be working right as it was clear that the machine was not moving the commanded distance. So he pushes some more buttons, edits the program a few times, looks at a few different parameters and menus and concludes that the previous owner changed the control to operate in an 'unconventional manner'. He goes on to bill me $795.00(that's 4.5 hours plus travel time), tells me the controller needs to be checked out and leaves me the phone number to Fanuc America. After he left I began to analyze the machine and discover (by measuring z axis travel with a ruler) that for every inch commanded the machine moved 1 centimeter. At this point the little bell in my head is dinging away, and I called Fanuc America (great service BTW), and a guy named Curt walks me through resetting the parameter the expert changed when making my displays read in inches. Turns out that that particular parameter switches how the control interprets the machine hardware, and not how the displays read out. So, some serious panic followed by a little diag, followed by a helpful phone call from Fanuc and I'm back to where we started.

But wait, there's more. So I called the 'manager' of this particular dealer, and he tells me that the trainer they sent was a Haas expert, and that they had another guy who was good with the Fanuc control. He also said that he would adjust the bill from $795 down to $225.

But wait there's more. Three weeks later I get the invoice from the dealer, and guess what. That's right they billed me the full amount. So I called them up, and left a message on the 'managers' answering machine. He doesn't call me back, so I left another message. He doesn't call me back so I leave another message. And another. Three messages. No call back. Nothing.

So, I had to call my credit card to dispute the charge. Can you believe it?

I can understand making a mistake setting a parameter, but I don't think it's a mistake to not adjust my bill, and not call me back when I call to find out why. I can't believe people still do business this way. I figure they rely on customer apathy, and probably get away with it more often than not.

Follow up: A VIP from Methods spoke with Selway about the problem and suddenly Selway was calling me to straighten things out. I've dealt with Methods on a couple of things and they've always come across as a well organized company staffed with experienced professionals. I wish they had West Coast location.

QB