A little background: I posted my plan to buy a 5-axis Haas for fabricating titanium firearm components and steel robotics stuff to this forum about a year ago, looking for feedback. Did people who know what they're doing think this is a good idea? After some quick discussion, I settled on a DMG Mori DMU65 Ultrasonic as my ultimate dream machine, and I made the down payment. I also bought a 1992 VF-2 with Machmotion control in order to learn and fill orders until the DMU65 arrived.
The DMU65 arrived a couple months ago. It's a beast: a 2014 DMU65 UL in perfect condition with 2000hrs on the spindle. It has turning capability, which I haven't yet made use of, except to spin up the 4th axis to 1100 rpm. It definitely does that. Pretty wild.
The spindle tops out at 18krpm, is HSK63a, and with ultrasonic engaged w/ ultrasonic toolholders and solid carbide end mills, it chews through titanium and hard steels, and the bits last a lot longer than they do on my VF-2. Much, much longer.
I'm ordering diamond bits for rotary ultrasonic grinding in order to do glass, ceramics, and make tungsten carbide pocket knife blades.
I use NX 11 for CAD/CAM (no support contract - I'm planning on buying one once I'm making more money). For post processing, I started off by modifying one of the posts included with NX, but using TCL to process such large volumes of data is just a terrible idea. Frankly, it completely sucks. We're topping out at a few hundred kilobytes a second... and dealing with gigabyte-sized programs. I ended up writing my own post in C++ and using ctrl-alt-c in NX CAM to dump out a CL file that my little C++ post ingests and converts to Siemens 840D code. The machine cycle GUIs in Siemens 840D did a wonderful job of showing me what machine cycles to call and what the parameters mean. I'm going to post it to github as GPL3 with the option to commercially license it - the same strategy Trolltech used for QT3.
Anyhow, this is turning into a wall of text, so I'll leave off here. Questions are welcome, and feel free to msg me if you have work you'd like me to run. I'm not yet using the machine 24/7; rates are negotiable.
The DMU65 arrived a couple months ago. It's a beast: a 2014 DMU65 UL in perfect condition with 2000hrs on the spindle. It has turning capability, which I haven't yet made use of, except to spin up the 4th axis to 1100 rpm. It definitely does that. Pretty wild.
The spindle tops out at 18krpm, is HSK63a, and with ultrasonic engaged w/ ultrasonic toolholders and solid carbide end mills, it chews through titanium and hard steels, and the bits last a lot longer than they do on my VF-2. Much, much longer.
I'm ordering diamond bits for rotary ultrasonic grinding in order to do glass, ceramics, and make tungsten carbide pocket knife blades.
I use NX 11 for CAD/CAM (no support contract - I'm planning on buying one once I'm making more money). For post processing, I started off by modifying one of the posts included with NX, but using TCL to process such large volumes of data is just a terrible idea. Frankly, it completely sucks. We're topping out at a few hundred kilobytes a second... and dealing with gigabyte-sized programs. I ended up writing my own post in C++ and using ctrl-alt-c in NX CAM to dump out a CL file that my little C++ post ingests and converts to Siemens 840D code. The machine cycle GUIs in Siemens 840D did a wonderful job of showing me what machine cycles to call and what the parameters mean. I'm going to post it to github as GPL3 with the option to commercially license it - the same strategy Trolltech used for QT3.
Anyhow, this is turning into a wall of text, so I'll leave off here. Questions are welcome, and feel free to msg me if you have work you'd like me to run. I'm not yet using the machine 24/7; rates are negotiable.