aussie_in_china
Banned
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2019
Background
Not experienced with production machining.
Current situation
About to buy a mill, trying to get a little more educated as to options.
Question
The major parts to be produced are:
Not having experience, I have been thinking about work holding and need advice.
I am aware:
What I would like to ask is are there pneumatically driven work holding systems that also provide workpiece rotation around axes other than Z?
What solutions are you aware of and am I completely off the wall with this line of thinking?
Those I am aware of:
Thanks for your consideration.
Not experienced with production machining.
Current situation
About to buy a mill, trying to get a little more educated as to options.
Question
The major parts to be produced are:
- Aluminium.
- Require machining from at least 3 of 6 faces.
- Likely be produced in batches of 8, 16 or 32.
- Likely be from bar stock, pre-cut to length.
Not having experience, I have been thinking about work holding and need advice.
I am aware:
- From other equipment that it is typically possible to use GCode ("M-codes" or similar) to flip relays to toggle the state of external subsystems, including work holding systems.
- There are pneumatically driven work holding systems, some of which support rotation.
- Machining many parts concurrently in batches amortizes the overhead of an operator-executed manual re-orientation operation across the total number of parts and thus reduces the impact substantially. However, I would really prefer not to have an operator present at all, if possible.
What I would like to ask is are there pneumatically driven work holding systems that also provide workpiece rotation around axes other than Z?
- Ideally I would like to reduce the number of manual re-orientations to zero for 3-face milling, and 1 for 6-face milling.
- At a minimum, I would like to reduce the number of manual re-orientations to 1 for 3-face milling.
What solutions are you aware of and am I completely off the wall with this line of thinking?
Those I am aware of:
- Rotary vise. Exist? Viable? How would this work when finally disconnecting the workpiece from bar stock? Recommendations?
- External robot arm or gantry. Undesirable due to cost, space, initial setup time, lack of reconfigurability, etc.
- Design a custom overhead robot to descend, release the workpiece, pick it up, re-orient it 90 degrees, and replace it on the new face, then retract to allow for continued milling. This would be triggered for all parts via an MCode.
- Pay someone to do the manual re-orientation including the mistakes, safety issues, reliability issues, and ongoing costs associated with humans.
Thanks for your consideration.