Anyone here use a Haas for any production-type work?

Hola,

Just wondering if anyone uses a Haas for anything other than at the job shop/prototype level? Does anyone really buy a Horizontal Haas with a pallet pool to run 24/7, or at that level does one swing for something higher on the totem pole like a Mori or Mazak?

I sorta ask because my dad (being old school) is not quite used to me cutting at 450ipm in aluminum. He's like "You're gonna wear out the servo motors!!" He's half joking, but half serious and my usual reply is "It's built for that!" But, maybe it's really not. I know there are better machines out there to be run at high speed for long lengths of time. So, who here runs their Haas balls out for long periods of time, and have you noticed any ill effects from doing so? I have 4 Haas's and the oldest is from 2005 so if someone's gonna bring up issues between old and Haas's, I have all new ones.

What do you mean by production? I don't know about 450ipm but we run several Haas machines on aluminum parts and they spend a lot of time running at 100 ipm with spindle loads up around 90 to 120%. I have a VF0 that has something like 5000 hours feed cutting time and it still performs fine. We checked the taper runout and axis backlash a few weeks ago and it both where better than we could measure with a 0.0005" digital dial gauge. We have VF2s, MiniMills, SuperMiniMills, SL10s, GT20s and they are nearly all running fulltime four days a week (we only do one shift). The lathes do bar work with feeders, the mills all have multi-part fixtures and they run cycle times from 10 minutes to 60 minutes nearly always at 10,000 rpm with feed up to 100ipm.

Haas machines are certainly not as rigid as some machines and if you want to get ultra fine finishes and precision at feed rates in the hundreds of ipm maybe you need more expensive machines but when you only need to meet +/-0.0005" tolerances I think they are the best value for money.

Regarding 'wearing out the servo motors' by feeding at 450 ipm, you should point out those same servos rapid at 1000 or more so 450 is less than half speed. Actually I just calculated that the servo/ballscrew on my VF0 has travelled over 400,000 feet at rapid; this is over 150,000 tool changes with 16" up and 16" back down to the job every tool change. Two of the SL10 have each done over a million toolchanges with no maintenance needed on the turrets.

Preciate' the response. I guess by production, I guess I kinda mean what you're talking about: Machines spending most of their on time with the spindles turning. I will never argue that Haas is the most bang for your buck, bar-none. Just when questions of reliability vs. performance come up, Haas is not usually on the tip of anyone's tongue when it comes to prolonged lights-out machining. We do very little production work, but now I have an order (possibly repeating, and possibly enough to buy a couple machines to meet yearly demands) that'll have these machines going as fast as possible for maybe a week straight, 12 hours a day. Just wanna quell fears around the shop that machining that fast is actually "bad" for the machine. And as I prepare to take over the business in a couple of years, I'd like to bring in production-type volumes in addition to the job shopping that is now our bread and butter, and make those speeds and feed a full time thing, rather than just a once in a while occurrence.

StreetSpeed said:

... Just wanna quell fears around the shop that machining that fast is actually "bad" for the machine. And as I prepare to take over the business in a couple of years, I'd like to bring in production-type volumes......

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You mention your Dad is 'old school'; you mean like in his sixties with a lifetime of experience on manual machines? Sounds a bit like me but I transitioned to CNC starting in 1999. It takes a little while to get used to what CNC machines can do but I did and now I probably drive the machines more aggressively than a lot of younger guys. My theory is once the machine has made enough money to pay for itself everything else is gravy and I like lots of gravy so those machines work hard. So what if I drive it into the ground it is paid for and has made more than enough money to replace it.

Here is something that is not 'old school' machining.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwsg-nNDD6U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFlu3uLtXK8

That's my dad. Just turned 60, started working at GE when he was 20, and been doing it ever since (aside from the time between when he got laid off and started this company). He made a niche for himself in the early 80's getting into Wire EDM when it was first being utilized, and I think he bought one of the first Haas VF-0's when they came out in the late 80's (early 90's?). So, it's not like he's been turning handles the last 40 years, but feeds in the several-hundred-inch-per-minute range, machining without coolant, 1XD DOC's, etc, are all definitely foreign to him, as well as the rest of the a-bit-past-middle-aged shop. I'm just a baby at 26 and while too old to still be a kid who thinks he knows everything, still young enough to embrace technology and find ways to go as fast as possible at everything I do.

Edit: And I'm digging your trochoidal moves. What do you use for programming?

WE do three shifts 6 days a week on the HAAS VF1,4

WE changed the z axis ball screw on 2 machines (after 2 years on one and 3 on the other)
also changed 2 spindle encoders.
TRP cracked on one machine and the doors are a perpetual problem on all the machines.

The drawbars failed prematurely on all the machines .

Thats that.

All the best with your new mazak.
MJM

StreetSpeed said:

....Edit: And I'm digging your trochoidal moves. What do you use for programming?

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Me.

I was just going to answer "me" but I was told the post had to be at least 10 characters so here is at least 10 characters.

Hdpg said:

Me.

I was just going to answer "me" but I was told the post had to be at least 10 characters so here is at least 10 characters.

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Huh? You mean program all those moves by hand? I meant what CAM software do you use...

No, I think he was answering your thread title with "ME".

Cause I was going to do that too.

I have 4 Haas Mills running 24/5 and have had minimal problems with most. and strange problems with one of my VF-7 Mills - Side Carousel Tool Changer replaced two times.

I have a Midaco Pallet system on a VF-5 that is running 3 shifts, 5 days a week. and mostly machining Dry. ( Without Coolant )

We have a new VF-7 being delivered in a week or so.

Mohawk

StreetSpeed said:

Huh? You mean program all those moves by hand? I meant what CAM software do you use...

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On another message board, he details this job in depth. He hand wrote that program, but he's only going in straight lines so it's just a pretty simple sub program looped several times if I remember correctly.

Gotcha. That's craziness (to me, anyway).

StreetSpeed said:

Huh? You mean program all those moves by hand? I meant what CAM software do you use...

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I guess I still need to pad the answer up with extra because the shortest way I can say it doesn't use ten words.


I meant what CAM software do you use(?) I don't.

HAAS minimill in production environment

An interested friend has been using a HAAS-mini in a moderate sized jobshop with numerous other machines and is keeping it busy on both steel and alum and probably 50-60% or more of their machined-parts business volume is well within the envelope of this unit. We were wondering what's happening to the normal cost for a used one (YES I know it all depends..) as there was rumored to be a one sold on Eglut for under $20K recently. With the downturn in business - is this a machine that is going to appear frequently?? at $30K or up we cant use it but at $20K or less it might be worth thinking about. Money and business are going to be quite tight for a while and its just NOT an option to spend more. Does anybody know here - does HAAS discount and resell the used ones they get back on failed finance deals or do they sell that stuff via a separate used - equipment dealer so it doesnt compete with their new-product line. Every salesperson I have asked says they dont have any info on that ( they really want to sell new only and dont have much conversation for anything else, (in PA.))

I was reading another post where a guy asked about used machines like this and the replies were consistently telling him how much of a mistake it was to spend so little money and get that machine- better to spend more and bla-bla-bla. Isnt it nice how so many folks have BETTER ways to spend OTHER FOLKS money when they arent signing for it themselves??

Useful and INFORMATIVE comments ( like more FACTS maybe and less OPINIONS) are appreciated but repeatedly criticising an opinion because you have a different one is NOT help for anybody - its just cawing about the poor quality of the free corn, and about the same value.

HAAS minimill in production environment

An interested friend has been using a HAAS-mini in a moderate sized jobshop with numerous other machines and is keeping it busy on both steel and alum and probably 50-60% or more of their machined-parts business volume is well within the envelope of this unit. its a very competitive market in that range also. We were wondering what's happening to the normal cost for a used or returned one (YES I know it all depends..) as there was rumored to be a one sold on Eglut for under $20K recently. With the downturn in business - is this a machine that is going to appear frequently?? at $30K or up we cant use it but at $20K or less it might be worth thinking about. Money and business are going to be quite tight for a while and its just NOT an option to spend more. Does anybody know here - does HAAS discount and resell the used ones they get back on failed finance deals or do they sell that stuff via a separate used - equipment dealer so it doesnt compete with their new-product line. Every salesperson I have asked says they dont have any info on that ( they really want to sell new only and dont have much conversation for anything else, (in PA.))

I was reading another post where a guy asked about used machines like this and the replies were consistently telling him how much of a mistake it was to spend so little money and get that machine- better to spend more and bla-bla-bla. Isnt it nice how so many folks have BETTER ways to spend OTHER FOLKS money when they arent signing for it themselves??

Useful and INFORMATIVE comments ( like more FACTS maybe and less OPINIONS) are appreciated but repeatedly criticising an opinion because you have a different one is NOT help for anybody - its just cawing about the poor quality of the free corn, and about the same value.

StreetSpeed said:

Gotcha. That's craziness (to me, anyway).

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Why, why, why?

I only needed one why but its that ten letter minimum again.

Hdpg said:

Me.
I was just going to answer "me" but I was told the post had to be at least 10 characters so here is at least 10 characters.

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Hdpg? I just figured out who you are. It's ok, your secret is safe with me.

Donkey Hotey said:

Hdpg? I just figured out who you are. It's ok, your secret is safe with me.

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Slow aren't you?

I don't spend much time here.

Hdpg said:

Why, why, why?

I only needed one why but its that ten letter minimum again.

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Because I can't fathom that punching in code out at the machine could ever be as efficient as programming with a CAM system. Am I misunderstanding something here?

Am I misunderstanding something here?

Probably, I have guys working for me who know CAN and are also very good at hand coding and sometimes for small routines it is quicker to hand code; especially when you expect you are going to be tweaking things because that saves a walk back into the office to change things on the PC.

For me it is an easy decision; I never learnt CAM, h*ll I never even learnt CAD, so I do everything by hand. I do use a simple 2D sketching program to get tangent points and things like that because I cannot be bothered calculating them. And don't tell me I should learn CAM, I am 65 and partly retired the only new thing I am learning these days is golf.

The program for these slots was really simple: It had a total of about 40 lines twelve of which were the positioning commands. The active part was nested subroutines running a mix of incremental and absolute and this was about 10 lines. It took about 30 to 40 minutes to write the code and prove it on a piece of scrap.

I gave the dimensions and conditions with the video; 12 slots, 0.76" wide, 1.24" deep spaced 1.3" center to center through a length of 1" hot rolled. Prepare a CAM program and post it as an attachment and I will run it on an empty machine to see if the cycle is as fast as mine. I didn't do any chamfering, just the 'trochoidal' moves and a clean up pass on each slot.