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Newbie EDM questions

xyzzy

Aluminum
Joined
Nov 29, 2008
Location
California, USA
Greetings -

I'm a small prototype shop focused mostly on vintage car restoration. Have a Fadal 3016 and Romi M17, both with Fanuc controls (as well as manual machines.) For historical reasons we use Solidworks/Gibbscam for CAD/CAM. I was thinking about adding another CNC machine like a Deckel to expand our capabilities, but it's been suggested a wire EDM would have a greater impact and better flexibility (think splines, gears, small, finicky old car parts, etc.)

I've started to look into it, and of course another learning curve. One initial problem, like many others have, is space. A Makino U3 or similar machine could fit, and is fine for X/Y travel but too limited for Z. A work envelope of 12x12x12 or a bit larger would be perfect.

I'd welcome any suggestions on machines or opinions in general. Should we jump into EDM or stick to what we know with conventional CNC machines?

Thanks - Jon
 
We use our wires to cut a fair amount of things like that, splines and gears and stuff. They are great for it. You just need to make sure you would be using it enough to justify the cost. If you are buying new you're looking at probably around 100k for the size you want. We are primarily a wire shop and I've seen more than one our customers buy a machine and regret it.

That being said, I am a big fan of Fanuc machines. A C400 would probably be a good size for you. I've found them very competitively priced, and I've yet to find a tolerance I couldn't hit. Also service has always been great.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk
 
Wire machines have a different sort of learning curve . . . not much relates to things learned doing other types of machine work, its just different. Principles of wire cutting are fairly short and simple to describe, but ALWAYS difficult to apply, i.e. flushing, flushing, flushing advise is often difficult to apply to oddly shaped 'car parts'. I suggest sending your wire work out to experienced shops, and wait until you constantly have work out before jumping in to a brand new machining technique.
 








 
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