So, the 27th was a day of a lot of traveling or me. I first went to a Mori open house (NH) to look at their CMX. Yuge machine. No way was that fitting in my shop without extensive surgery. I made it out of there and went down to Packard Machinery in Wesford MA. where I had an 11:30 demo scheduled.
The machine is super compact, no other way to say it. Yes, it has 30" x 20" travels, but they really figured out how to trim off the excess footprint. The machine weighs 10k, so it doesn't appear that they reduced the casting.
Cutting: It takes a solid cut with no complaints. They had a 3" facemill buried .150", 60% stepover. 1500rpm and about 35ipm. Running around 25% motor load. They also were full width slotting with an Iscar facemill (square shoulder) about .150" deep as well. Not a peep out of it.
Criticisms, or things to consider:
1) Very small chip pan area. The chip pan is quite close to the bottom of the table. Included conveyor will need to be run frequently. None of this "clean it out at end of shift". But, it is M code capable, so just embed it in your program. There is also included chip flushing, so that is sweet
2) Table size. This is one area they were able to trim down on overall footprint. The table is not a lot bigger than it's travel. Why is this a criticism/consideration? I expect to mount indexers, 4th axis and tailstocks to the machine at some point, and it's always nice having them mounted in "unusable" territory, to best utilize the cutting window
3) Belt drive: Noisy at certain speeds. They were kind enough to ramp the demo machine up to cap (12k). We found that at certain breakpoints (8k, 9500) there were some harmonics in the machine sheet metal that rattled fierce. I think strategic use of stick-on neoprene pads at certain points will greatly reduce the noise.
4) M0 and M30 do NOT unlock the doors. Kitamura has not addressed this in the ladder (yet), so you either A)press the unlock button on control panel, or B) disconnect the door interlock. Personally, I'm not keen on bypassing safety, but I'm the shop owner and the legal risk is there. Since I currently work solo, I just might. Employees will require I lock it back up.
5) 24+1 tools. I was hoping to upgrade to the 40 tool option but that is no longer available. When they designed the 4XD, they decided to give that the 40 option and abandon the 3XD option. For what I do, I don't see many jobs where that will be a huge issue, so there's that...
Praises:
The Mitsubishi control (the JR. control is really Mits.) has a skin that you can turn on that emulates the look of a Fanuc. Either mode looks fine.
"Fish-eye" style coolant nozzles, so no loc-line to destroy. Although there is some on there, it's not 100% needed.
Fast rapids with no complaint. I've seen some machines where they way covers simply don't like being moved that fast. Not this machine.
Same pull-stud and programming as my Mori (yay for me)
Built like a brick outhouse.
Will fit through a standard garage door with only minor modification. The head completely disappears in the sheetmetal when it's in it's shipping position. Top of sheetmetal is 86", assuming it would be on a forklift just off the ground.
