Dennis, I meant to post this up a while back but ran into some technical difficulties with using Photobucket and forgot to come back to it. I could not post the entire tombstone as it was loaded with customer parts, but will give you pics of the business ends...what's in the middle doesn't really matter here anyway.
Here is the Tsudakoma Rotary with the 5" square tombstone and 12" diameter faceplate/tombstone base - we use two Jergens ball Locks to hold them together. The faceplate has two 3/4" dowell pins and the baseplate is notched to match - this is for easy loading of the tombstone with the crane, and the ball locks will slip right in when it's resting on the dowels. Of course this is rotated 45 degrees so you can see the goodies, but we load at "A" zero. You can see the baseplate and the tombstone column are welded together; they were doweled and four 3/8" SHCS were holding them together, but we started getting repeatability issues and found they were slipping slightly under load, so we indicated the two tomstones to the same rotational locations, tack welded them, threw them back in to make sure they had not moved, and then put a bit more weld on them to seal the deal. They don't move anymore.
Here is the tailstock end with a sliding pin to engage a sealed bearing pressed into the end of the tombstone which is turned to a 4.500" OD. The sliding pin rides in a brass bushing and has a detent and spring loaded ball set screw on the top to keep it in place when it's running. The tailstock and Koma rotary are mounted on a 1.50" thick subplate (plus their own base plates were cut so the centerlines match), and they overhang the machine table a little so we still get most of the machine travel. The Koma table and tailstock are doweled into the subplate and the subplate is doweled to the machine table for easy realignment when we need to pull any of it.
This is another view of the tailstock; there is a height adjustable Vee block that supports the 4.5" round section of the tailstock when loading. We bring the tombtone over the vee block and dowel pins, slowly (can that actually be done with a full load of parts???) lower the tombstone onto the 3/4" dowel pins and vee block, slip in the slider pin and the two Jergens pins, snug up the ball lock set screws and push the green button. We can swap the two tombstones in about 3 minutes after some operator practice. This load of parts runs about a 2 hour cycle, so we can usually get four loads attended and one load unattended per day pretty easily. This is WAY better than moving these parts through four double station Kurts!
Hope this spurs some ideas for improvements over this set up, but of course you have to post pics!
Steve
