Agie Charmilles cut 200 Turn while burm

Does anyone on here have a cut200 that turns and burns? we are trying to convert from our old sodick aq 325L and cannot get the tech down. The guy who ran the sodick didn't want to show anyone how to use it he got let go. so now im in the dark with the sodick machine. We got a cut 200 a year ago and went to training on it, but no one seems to turn while burn. any help would be awesome since agie charmilles has been no help on the subject. its a cc generator the same as the older charmilles so anyone with that background would be helpful as well. I'm only a year in to the edm world so any help would be appreciated. Also anyone who knows how to program on the sodick would be helpful as well.

Cut 200 Sp HMI control
Sodick AQ 325l LN1W control

Hi brainvillehtw:
Can you tell us a bit more about what sort of difficulty you're having?

Can the rotary talk to the control properly or is the problem there?
When you try to command the rotary can you even index it or jog it from the control?
Does it try to do a burn and crap out or won't it even begin to burn?

Are you by chance, trying to use a Sodick rotary on the Agie machine?
If it's anything like the rotary on my old Sodick that won't work because the old Sodick rotaries were some kind of weirdo super high count sealed steppers that needed a special board and wouldn't run without it.

Is the problem perhaps in the code you're writing?
Are you getting error messages?
Has the system you're trying to coax into life worked for your predecessor?
Let us know more info and maybe someone can chime in with a solution.
Cheers

Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
www.vancouverwireedm.com
Clarus Microtech Inc. | Facebook

Marcus,
The rotaries we have are both stand alone models, they spin at a programed RPM. They are not connected to the machines. Hermann Schmidt Makes the rotary that is in our AgieCharmilles. Now being new to the EDM world, and no one around here does a lot of 4th axis rotary work I'm not expert. But I write the program like it wasn't spinning, I do half the profile of the punch and then change the technology in the machine way out of wack until it burns to size and surface finish required. That is how they did it in the sodick so naturally I tried to convert those values to the new machine. I'm not sure what is the right way to program this? or if I m explaining well enough.?
-Brent

brainvillehtw said:

Marcus,
The rotaries we have are both stand alone models, they spin at a programed RPM. They are not connected to the machines. Hermann Schmidt Makes the rotary that is in our AgieCharmilles. Now being new to the EDM world, and no one around here does a lot of 4th axis rotary work I'm not expert. But I write the program like it wasn't spinning, I do half the profile of the punch and then change the technology in the machine way out of wack until it burns to size and surface finish required. That is how they did it in the sodick so naturally I tried to convert those values to the new machine. I'm not sure what is the right way to program this? or if I m explaining well enough.?
-Brent

Click to expand...

I know nothing about "turn-n-burn" but why are you altering the tech instead of skim cutting with the existing tech?

KilrB,
our regular tech will not get our finish and size, extra skims passes only skip across the profile and do nothing. Non modified tech does the same thing. It's a weird set up, but from what I understand since we don't have a indexer that plugs into the machine we are stuck changing tech values. versus having it calculate it for us? I'm not sure if that is how it works.

Turn & Burn

brainvillehtw

I have an article that will explain what you are up against, but it is too large for this forum. If you would privately send me your e-mail, I would be happy to send it to you.

Bud Guitrau

Bud,
I messaged you. Thankyou for your help, hopefully I can get some answers

Hi again brainvillehtw:
The thing with "spin-and-burn" which is what you're describing is that the EDM control does not have any influence over the rotation rate of the rotary.
This means a couple of things.
First, the rate at which material will be presented to the wire is no longer fully within the control's influence, so it cannot fully compensate for the cutting conditions in the gap in the same way it can when the block is static.
Second, the apparent thickness of the material is not what it seems so there is no standard tech you can use and you have to go back to first principles to find cutting conditions that can cope.

Imagine you're roughing and you spin the workpiece very fast.
The rate at which new material is presented to the wire for it to burn that material away is influenced by the DOC and by the spindle speed, as well as by the rate of advance, which is the only thing the control can influence.

So in effect you've set the feedrate absurdly high for the spark energy you've told it to use, and you must back it off correspondingly so the gap doesn't choke and short or break the wire.
This is likely why you are not seeing the expected result of your skim passes; you're telling the control to effectively remove far more material per unit time than is reasonable for the tech settings.

In addition, there is no "slot", the flush cups are miles away from the burning surface and the water flow is influenced by the spin rate of the rotary.
So you have intrinsically poor flushing conditions for which you also must compensate, and you have non-linear water flow along the wire which will tend to deflect the wire.
The long distance between the wire guides makes this worse, so you need to run higher wire tension to compensate, even when roughing.

This is all completely empirical, which means you can't just look it up in a table, but have to take the time to experiment, and learn what to do.
Lots of Wire Guys typically don't do this easily; we're trained to follow the recipe to get the expected result and when we work strictly according to the recipe, we get the result we wanted, whereas when we deviate from the recipe even in little ways, we get a screwup (usually loss of dimensional control).
There ain't no recipe for this!!!

So grit your teeth, break out the test parts and learn what you need to know in order to make it work.
It ain't magic, but it can be pretty frustrating until you've farted about with it a good bit and learned what works.
Everybody has to cut you some slack while you do this; and you can't accept blame if it takes what it takes, so if there are individuals in your company trying to hurry you along you may invite them to piss off.

Cheers

Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
www.vancouverwireedm.com
Clarus Microtech Inc. | Facebook

Marcus,
That's pretty much what I've been doing, you hit it right on the nail. I tried to talk the bosses to get the more expensive control that connects, but with money in mind they went against it. so yes just like you said I'm stuck fiddling with the values and burning a lot of carbide test pieces. But, the higher ups and the production guys see it as sitting at a computer all day doing nothing! I get my ball broke a lot for it. Thank you for your help. But do you think it would make a huge increase in time and aggravation to get a machine controlled one? What do you think?
Brent

Hi again brainville:
No, the kind of rotary that will allow cutting condition commands from the machine control will not help you at all (assuming I properly understand what you want to do).

What you must realize is that there are basically 3 ways to use a rotary on a wire.
The simplest and most common is "index and burn"
That allows you do do exactly that: your rotary gets an M code to index (basically an "I'm finished and ready for index" from the EDM control to the rotary control)
The controls do not need to speak cutting conditions to each other, but they need to speak "do it" from the EDM controller and "I'm done now, you can do your stuff again" from the rotary controller.
While the machine is burning, the rotary does not move and doesn't care what's happening in the spark gap.

The next is "spin and burn" in which the rotary is totally stupid and cannot be commanded.
In this case you're trying to use the wire EDM as a lathe, and from your description, I believe this is the case you're dealing with.
All of what I talked about applies only to this case.

The third case is "turn while burn"
In this case the rotary has to speak to the EDM controller such that the EDM controller can command how fast the rotary has to turn in order to maintain the spark gap conditions you need in order for the burn to progress.
It also needs to know how far along the shape you are so it ends up in the right spot at every point during the burn
You use this when you want to burn fancy things like spirals.

Each case makes TOTALLY different demands on the rotary.
Typically, indexing and "turn while burn" are the easiest cases from an operator point of view, because the EDM controller calls the shots during "turn while burn" and indexing is just fancy fixturing with zero demands on the rotary during a burn.
"Spin and burn" is the hardest to get right because of all the cutting condition variables that the EDM controller has no power over.

Since you're not talking between the rotary and the EDM controller during "spin and burn" anyway, having the ability doesn't do anything for you in this case.

Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
www.vancouverwireedm.com
Clarus Microtech Inc. | Facebook

Brent,

I sent it to the address you gave me. Let me know if you received it ok.

Bud Guitrau

who did you speak to at AGIECHARMILLES? Brian it's mg call me when you can.

I don't recall who i spoke too, i'll pm you