Shop Upgrade

I need to prepare a proposal for equipment upgrade for a medium-size shop with a few old (15-20 years) CNC Milling Centers (mostly Matsuura and Mori Seiki). Would you share with me some ideas how to approach the task, how to start it? What's the best way to get some overview of the present state of the market? Which machines (brands) are good, which are not... Which questions to ask... What information to have when inquiring for equipment... etc...
Thanks a lot for any help

What is the target of the medium-size shop, service, specialty, quantity, quality, speed, shifts?
Start with the tooling, make everything universal-inter changeble, then build(buy) the machines around it.

I'm in a large shop. 450,000 ft. sq., 250 machines. We track OEE or Overall equipment effectiveness. There are 3 components to OEE; machine availability, productivity, and quality. When we look at machines, we want some numbers from them that show their machines are available at least 95% of the time. The 5% would include planned maintenance. We also look at MTBF or mean time between failure and MTTF or mean time to fix. It's amazing the builders that will have this information when you ask for it and those that tell you they have to get back to you.

BTW, IMO everybody should be looking at OEE. All that it does it tell you that your machines are running and making good parts. World class is about 85%. When we first started tracking, we had machines in single digits.
JR

I can agree with the universal part of the tooling. Machines come with T-slot tables that are for the most part worthless. The first thing you'll have to do is build a table that's pinned and bolted with a cheeseplate pattern of alternating pin holes and threaded ones. We use a 2x2 pattern. This makes all tooling work on all machines. Expect to pay atleast 5k to make this table, but you'll save that in the first few months of time wasted indicating anything straight. Also, with this method the origin holes can be documented meaning setups can be done in a matter of minutes. It's just a matter of typing them back in.

As for machine makers, I'm inclined to believe that you get what you pay for. The lower end machines may work for a few years, but expecting 15-20 years from them is probably a stretch. Also, what specific type of work are you planning to do on them? This will determine a lot as to rigidity, work envelope, rapids, and tool change times. All of these factor into the cost and decision making process.

I'm also a firm believer in picking a standard controller. This way employees can move between work cells as the need arises without having to get specific training. If they are used to a Fanuc, and you need them to work on a Mazak you'll have some downtime. We only have 7 CNC mills in my shop, and this is what I've gathered.

I can agree with the universal part of the tooling. Machines come with T-slot tables that are for the most part worthless. The first thing you'll have to do is build a table that's pinned and bolted with a cheeseplate pattern of alternating pin holes and threaded ones. We use a 2x2 pattern. This makes all tooling work on all machines. Expect to pay atleast 5k to make this table, but you'll save that in the first few months of time wasted indicating anything straight. Also, with this method the origin holes can be documented meaning setups can be done in a matter of minutes. It's just a matter of typing them back in.

Click to expand...

The above quote is really good advice and I can only second it.

Even in my rinky-dink world the first thing I did (for my Haas TM-1) was design and make heavy tooling plates for the machine table. The main plate is Zertal Alu and has a grid of threaded holes. Onto this plate come an assortment of alu plates with their own threaded holes, all of which are saved in my computer. This allows me to fix work pieces quickly and accurately, avoid crashing into hold downs and screws (because they are already saved with the drawing) and saves a ton of time.

The plates are all faced in place on my machine so everything is squared and trued.

I can change tooling plates very rapidly and for most of what I do, I never even mount a vice on the machine.

There are companies who make really cool tooling systems. One I know of is www.hohenstein-gmbh.de
but that stuff gets really expensive.