gkoenig
Titanium
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2013
- Location
- Portland, OR
So this is all familiar from all the other Speedio threads, the big silver box, the cool space ship bag, yadda yadda.
Andy (2of3) put up with literally 2 years of bullshit questions from me. He and Yamazen have been as top-notch as everyone says. Ngon was my installer and he was great!
Some notes:
- This machine is absurdly well built. Literally every fastener was paint marked. The fit and finish is flawless. Hose routing, layout, wiring, etc are all just extremely well done.
- Yamazen is now distributing Metrol probes as part of their tooling division. I was a bit hesitant, but it's all backed by Yamazen and the pricing brings fitting a Speedio with probing to Haas WIPS level. So far I've been very impressed with it (the Metrol is absurdly well built). Yamazen supplies their own macro package that is as fully functioned as the ones from Renishaw or Blum. We'll see how it works out in the long term, but my initial impressions, and after probing a bunch of stuff for a week, I'm quite happy with Metrol.
- After seeing Tonyda36 continually praise them, I went with the Sankyo RCC170 for the 4th axis. It has the same rotational speed as the competing non-DDR tables, but uses a unique roller drive mechanism with zero backlash and absolutely no need to lock/unlock. I considered a DDR, but the way I want to run this is with a quick-change short tombstone full of parts that can come in/out easily... DDR tables *suck* for rigidity. The Sankyo gives up almost nothing in speed for one of the most rigid 4th axis drives made. It isn't slow:
@lumalabs on Instagram: “Sankyo very much! Not as fast as a DDR table (75RPM), but roller lock design means no .7sec clamp and .7sec unclamp, making the Sankyo…”
- I put two Lang 96mm Quick Point systems in the machine; one on the right side of the table, the other on the Sankyo. I considered 5th Axis, but they would have had to build a custom unit for the Sankyo (Lang simply bored an existing rotary face plate, as is their standard for this kinda situation). What put my decision between the two over the top is that Lang 20mm studs are $75, 5th Axis ones are almost double the price. One issue is that Lang plates are ground, but not concentric to the grid pattern. I tried cooking up an alignment dingus of my own, but could only get the rotary concentric within 0.0005". I'm new to 4th axis work, so I want to eliminate any fudge variables as possible... I think I can get it dialed in better than that, but I don't really know. The Lang stuff is absurdly well thought out and beautifully built.
- Eric at Orange customized a 6x17.5" vise for me with the standard 96mm grid pattern so I could plug it into the Lang on the table. My first machine was a Robodrill sold to me by Milacron, with one of Eric's very first 6x16" vises. I had updated it with some Gen II CarveSmart jaws, but Eric's latest product is just a world away from where he was just a couple of years ago. The modularity and flexibility of Orange vises is readily noticed from the marketing material, but with the Speedio, I've got a bunch of other highest-end kit in the door (Lang, Schunk, Sandvik). Orange is putting out product that is very apparently on the same quality level as these guys. For example:
@lumalabs on Instagram: “@orangeviseofficial 17.5x6” vise that Eric customized with a 96mm grid on the bottom. It’s sitting on a @langtechnik raster plate that I…”
- Finally, the Speedio itself is just silly gods damn fast. I poured over every Speedio video for years, and the first time I got to see one running absolutely balls-out has been my own machine and it's simply fucking amazing. It's machine that's gone to plad.
@lumalabs on Instagram: “My god, it’s full of stars here...”
- Unlike Robodrills, you can hit the ATC button and have the tool in the spindle get placed in the turret, and manually spin that turret around. Or basically take the tool out of the spindle directly and take it out without ever making it go for a turret spin. This is super nice!
- I don't know if this is how the rest of the world works, but G53 Z0 on this machine is the table. "Home" for the machine is really Z18.89 (or something that probably is way cleaner in metric).
- The control is way nicer than the old Fanuc. Only issue I have right now is that I can't call a custom macro as a G-code from the MDI (which the manual says it should be able to, Yamazen has yet to get back to me on this). C-00 is obviously not some great paradigm shift in controller human interfaces (lots of controls are slicker), but a better description for it would be if a Fanuc control was made by actual humans. They are very similar, but everything about the C-00 is just a lot more logically laid out and makes sense.
- Finally, the brass tacks. I expected a few weeks of downtime as I moved out the Robodrill, moved in the Speedio, re-did all my workholding and machining strategies, etc. We had an unanticipated rush on one product, so I decided to knock 45 of them out on the old fixture, with old strategies, and the same tooling I had on the Robodrill... The fixture is a progressive (multi-op) affair that takes one piece of stock for Op1, makes 2 parts, and takes them through 2 more stations for Op2, and a final drilling station for Op3. 40 operations in total, with 12 tools. One complete, finished set of parts every cycle start, and after a little tweaking across the run of parts:
Robodrill: 8:55
Speedio: 4:58
In every way, the Speedio is a total fucking win.
Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be building a little sub-plate to move the Sankyo closer to the edge of the table and towards the door (not hanging it 5" off the way some folks have!), and relocating the Metrol tool setter behind it and to the Y axis edge.
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