New Toy! LNS Bar feeder.

We bought a bar feeder at IMTS this year, and finally got it installed. I had a barfeed interface installed about a year ago on the lathe (2008 Okuma Captain L370BBMW). I've had the lathe for 8 years already loading bars by hand. Looking forward to a little lights out production soon.

I plan to use it in subspindle mode, loading bars only and pulling with the subspindle. Any pointers would be appreciated.

We have one very similar to that, hooked up to our Kiaturn 15LMS with Fanuc Oi-TB. I don't personally operate it, just program the machine. It's been good, though. I would suggest a top cut subprogram to be run when a new bar is loaded. The following is what we use, but obviously will not work undedited on your Okuma. However, if you get the gist of it, you can write some Okuma code to do the same thing:

Top of part program:

N10 G00 G20 G40 G80
N20 G59 G28 B0
#100 = .25 ( X CLEARANCE DIAMETER FOR TOP CUT )
#101 = .02 ( Z POSITION FOR TOP CUT )
#102 = 0. ( X END DIAMETER FOR TOP CUT )
#103 = .0015 ( FEED RATE FOR TOP CUT )
#104 = 200 ( SPINDLE SPEED FOR TOP CUT )
/2 M98 P1244

Subprogram for top cut:

%
O1244
M5
M9
G28U0
M69
M10
M68
M40
M54
G50S2000
G96S#104M3
T0707
G0G54X#100Z#101
M8
G1G99X#102F#103
G0X#100
G0G53X0Z-10.
G28U0
M5
M99
%

Sometimes, we let the bar pusher advance the stock for one sided jobs. In that case, change the top of the part program to:

N10 G00 G20 G40 G80
N20 G59 G28 B0
N30 M05
N40 M69
N50 M10
N60 M68
#100 = 1.6 ( X CLEARANCE DIAMETER FOR TOP CUT )
#101 = .02 ( Z POSITION FOR TOP CUT )
#102 = 0. ( X END DIAMETER FOR TOP CUT )
#103 = .002 ( FEED RATE FOR TOP CUT )
#104 = 250 ( SPINDLE SPEED FOR TOP CUT )
/2 M98 P1244

In the first case, you would set the bar pusher to let the sub spindle do the feeding. In the second case, you would set the bar pusher itself to do the feeding.