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Live Tooled Lathes w/Y axis. How many Live Tool Stations Minimum is Best?

wrustle

Titanium
Joined
Jun 8, 2006
Location
Massachusetts
Curious to know what those of you who run these lathes day in and day out (live tools in Y axis lathe) find to be the best mix of live tools and fixed (is that worded correctly?)?

Standard 12 station turret.

What is the best mix in your opinion and your reason for believing it is.


New Machine Day coming soon.........

Later,
Russ
 
I dont think this question can be answered. It totally depends on the part. If you are milling a flat and then drilling and tapping a hole you may need 4 tools.
Or if you go out of your way and have a drill-csink cobo custom made in 1 tool you only need 3 tools.

Back in the day I used to make some gun parts and the program had 8 live tools and just 1 cut off lathe tool. Part used to run on the mill with a full time operator. On the lathe cycle time was reduced 20% and ran lights out for 5 hours.

For what we do , tool holders, we use more x-live tools than z-live tools. Most of the time in my job shop days it was the same. Like a 2-1 ratio.
 
Lots. Machine length drills can eliminate spotting drills, but you can still find a use for everything that spins on a y axis lathe!
 
Be very wary of machines with say 6 live tools in a 12 tool spindle, versus a turret with 12 live tools. Not only will 6 sometimes not be enough (happened to me) while 12 would have been plenty, BUT it will also tend to be those tool spots stick out less, or stick out more, or whatever, which can make for a very serious headache....
 
As stated above, depends on the part. I have some that use 8 live out of my 12 station turret. I’ve also used it to mill parts that don’t have any turning at all done to them...lights out bar fed milling.
 
Ive had up to 25 or 26? On a single Turret, plus another 10 or 12 below. How many Static Tools do you really need?

OD 3x
ID
Big drill.
Thread
Groove (can mean lots of things)

I don't spot holes in a rotating part. I don't pilot holes, I don't use Roughing and Finishing tools....

R
 
Ive had up to 25 or 26? On a single Turret, plus another 10 or 12 below. How many Static Tools do you really need?

OD 3x
ID
Big drill.
Thread
Groove (can mean lots of things)

I don't spot holes in a rotating part. I don't pilot holes, I don't use Roughing and Finishing tools....

R

I’ll bet you eat with your hands and stand up to pee too. Animal...

If you are going to spend the money on a live tool machine, make sure it has a sub-spindle. And as many live tool stations as possible.
 
There are never enough....

Axial live holders, get as many as you can that are double ended, so you can hit the main and the sub with one position. I really don't know why single ended axial holders are even a thing, let alone why they seem to be vastly more common.

Use the Y axis to your advantage for turning tools. You can get 4 in one position (two facing main, two facing sub) without too much effort. A lot of 12 station turrets will not have room to gang stick tools, but you can use systems like Sandvik's SL to your advantage here, or Capto if you have deep pockets.

Get at least one adjustable angle live tool, with quick change holders/collets.

I tend to keep three of each axial and radial in the turret, roughing and finishing turning tools, and two boring bar holders, and the last two spaces are whatever I need.

At least that's the theory. In practice there is a LOT of tool swapping. For low quantity work, live tool Y axis lathes are not as cool as they were in my head.
 
What Gregor said. MD/MT Tools makes Axial and Face holders with 6 collet seats. Static banks that take 4 Stick tools. That's 16 Tools in 3 Turret stations. But they aren't cheap.

R
 
What Gregor said. MD/MT Tools makes Axial and Face holders with 6 collet seats. Static banks that take 4 Stick tools. That's 16 Tools in 3 Turret stations. But they aren't cheap.

R

I have actually found recently that Lyndex is cheaper on quad stacks and multi ID holders.
 
Entirely dependent on the parts and shop, but here's what we did for our Haas DS30Y.

TL;DR - get at least one, if not two, dual-spindle radial live tools (we are happy with WTO), for much better chuck clearance and doubling your available tools. Try to get at least one similar axial holder - dual-spindle on one side if you do not have a subspindle, or quad-spindle with two on each side if you do. Then add in at least one or two regular radial and axial holders.

We have two regular, single-spindle radial holders and two regular axial holders. Then we have one radial holder with two spindles, where each spindle is offset from Y0 by 1.378", and an axial holder with two spindles on each side - two for the main spindle, two for the sub. Obviously a pretty penny. Pretty much twice/four times what a single-spindle live tool costs! ($5k for the dual radial/$10k for the quad axial) So with everything, we have about $21k in live tools (as the Haas lathes come with one each radial and axial), I wish we had more. At least a second dual radial holder.

Those two multi-spindle tools get way more use than most other tools though and I would highly recommend giving it a look. Costs a crap-ton of money, but lathes are so horribly limited with tool stations. By the time you have OD turning, threading, cutoff, a drill, a boring bar, there's almost half the turret.

There's another huge benefit to the dual radial holder as well, it has much better chuck clearance than plain holders. Using the stock 10" chuck, almost any time we use a regular radial live tool, the tool has to be put in some kind of extension. Making it even less rigid etc.. The dual spindle units extend about 3.5" from the turret face vs. about 1.5", pretty huge. If you're smart and use a collet chuck, that may be a non-issue.

The only issues with these multi-spindle live tools are, A) if you have to move much offset from Y0 for the feature, you're a lot more limited. In our case instead of +/-2", we have about +.620/-3.38 or vise-versa. B) is clearance, as you now have two tools in the same station. It can take some jerry-rigging to get the clearances right.

Thing is, it really can be tricky to have enough tools, even with all this. If you have a part with a drilled and tapped hole in the side, that's two tools. If it has another size hole, there's another drill. If you want to chamfer these holes, that's all four tools (if you have four like we do). Same for axial. Just having two different sizes of tapped holes can wipe out four live tools.
 








 
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