Circle Milling OD O-ring Grooves on Conversational Mill

aerodark · Feb 10, 2013

I want some input on others' experience with this. Typical tight tolerance o-ring groove with nice surface finish requirement. Trak 3 axis control. I see the grooving insert tools offered by Horn and think they will work. Experienced real results may save me some grief!

jkruger · Feb 10, 2013

I did this exact thing last Wednesday on a Prototrak. (with a HSS woodruff key cutter) I roughed it around the center and then took spring passes to clean up the sides of the grooves and bottom. Worked perfectly in 6061-T6.

aerodark · Feb 10, 2013

jkruger said:
I did this exact thing last Wednesday on a Prototrak. (with a HSS woodruff key cutter) I roughed it around the center and then took spring passes to clean up the sides of the grooves and bottom. Worked perfectly in 6061-T6.

Out of curiosity, how well does your Trak hold roundness? Ours seem to have problems every 90° where the table changes direction.

jkruger · Feb 10, 2013

Some of ours are better than others and it is due to the wear in the leadscrews. The control can make some corrections by itself, but is seems like to get it right we have to enter the offsets manually. I forget the exact sequence to do that but it is an easy procedure. Takes about 30 minutes. The machine I was using is a 15 year old Lagun FTV-2 with the SMX control. It seems to cut larger in the +X, -Y quadrant by about .0015" per 2" on the diameter.

allen mullis · Feb 17, 2013

I have 6 prototrak mills and would trust any to do an o-ring groove, I would do arc in , minimum 2 full rounds and arc out. The nature of an O-ring is to compensate for surface imperfections and irregularities. What do you call tight tolerance anyway? +/- 2 micron or +/-a thou. I don't know what the size of ring is, but they should tolerate the "bump" left by the axis reversing. As to the PH Horn cutters, they work great and cut consistently part after part. You won't go back to a woodruff cutter for slots and grooves. Better finish, better feed rate, indelibility, repeatability and the inserts last if you don't screw up.

aerodark · Feb 17, 2013

Tight tolerances here: Size .002" total, roundness .001"total. Size of Ø.440 with a width of .040".

Thanks.

jkruger · Feb 17, 2013

aerodark said:
Tight tolerances here: Size .002" total, roundness .001"total. Size of Ø.440 with a width of .040".

Thanks.

That should be no problem at all.

aerodark · Feb 17, 2013

Thanks for the replies. All this has been helpful. Boss shot down the idea, and if we get the bid, will end up tooling the parts for O-ring cutting on the lathe.

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Circle Milling OD O-ring Grooves on Conversational Mill

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