New Machine(s) Day! Brother S700X2 and Hardinge GT-27SP

New (and used) machines day! I needed another spindle to keep some of my products off backorder and also to support some additional job shop stuff I've taken on to help out a local shop with some growth issues. I was shopping for a used Speedio but after mucking about for a few months I just pulled the trigger on a new machine.

Speedio S700X2 with a T-200A 4th axis on it, 21-tools, 435psi TSC, Blum probing and toolsetting, and Amano mist collector. It has the 16k spindle and dual contact upgrade, which was on special (so I basically just had to buy the tool washdown option and got the spindle face upgrade for free). I also finagled a small tooling certificate to get me started with the BT30, and I've got a full shopping cart at Maritool for the rest of what I need.



Hardinge is placed. Can't say enough about P.W. Walsh here in Southeastern Wisconsin. They are a little expensive, but they are very, very good. I pay hourly and they always get the job done fast. I had the Speedio shipped directly to them, and they picked up this and another Hardinge GT yesterday and are delivering the Brother and my lathe today.



More to come!

Wrustle you're not!! He would take at least a week from outside to inside pictures.

I just had to pull the tool carousel cover to fit it under a 91" doorway. Set it in place and I'm running parts on the Okuma while doing the wiring and air line extension. I wanted to stick it in the taller part of the shop but this makes the most sense for how I am doing the building rehab in phases. I will have to move this machine twice over its life here.



As you can see I haven't done any of the floor coating on this side of the shop. I'll get there.



Waiting for the probing to show up and then install is going to be (I think) Thursday or Friday. Not bad; less than two weeks from Purchase Order to running machine.

So what new in the X2 models over the X1's?

david n said:

So what new in the X2 models over the X1's?

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New casting with updates, ATC updates to make it even smoother and faster, new way covers on X and Y (inverted V), updated chip wash system with more cleaning available at the front of the enclosure, new chip trough design for more chip and coolant flow, larger control cabinet with room for automation additions...
Congrats on the new machine! Sounds like you ordered a nice package. Shop looks great!
The most Brother machines I have personally seen in one place was in Wisconsin. Over 150 Brother machines in cells making Caterpillar parts!

At first glance they appear about the same. My X2 is 3-5% faster on most programs. It seems to be faster on X and Y rapids almost as if the acceleration on those axis has been increased? Both are stupid fast and you’d need a slow motion video to tell exactly where it’s faster.

A couple of the control pages have been updated in a good way. The cycle time page now shows previous cycle times for each pallet so you know how much time is left before you need to change parts. Hint: it’s never much.

High speed machining has some new features.

My IT guy also noticed the circuit boards have a protective coating not found on the X1’s.

The brother application engineer will be training us this week if he know of other improvements I’ll post them.

I was most excited about the new casting and the angled way covers. It looks like the only chip management issues I ever saw on the X1s will have been solved.

I did forget to order the patrol light. I also have to decide between Lang and Jergens for the 4th axis workholding. I may modify my old Kurt 3600Vs for a pattern to make them easily swappable. I hate wasting time on things like tramming vises!

Installation confirmed for Thursday. Electrical and air supply are ready to go.

Rick Finsta said:

I did forget to order the patrol light.

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Are you referring to the Red-Yellow-Green signal tower light? You can find LED ones on fleabay for about $30. Get 24VDC compatible.

Thanks, Frank! I have a buddy that we poached from Yamazen at the old shop who is going to get me his probing macros and he can install the light, too. The Blum macros were not very good (unless Blum has updated them to allow multiple sequential and random tool touchoff - the one-at-a-time thing was tedious when setting up a job).

Another thing I noticed about the X2 is it has captive screws in a lot of the places that did not on the X1s. No more losing screws!

Rick Finsta said:

Thanks, Frank! I have a buddy that we poached from Yamazen at the old shop who is going to get me his probing macros and he can install the light, too. The Blum macros were not very good (unless Blum has updated them to allow multiple sequential and random tool touchoff - the one-at-a-time thing was tedious when setting up a job).

Another thing I noticed about the X2 is it has captive screws in a lot of the places that did not on the X1s. No more losing screws!

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Out here we use tool setting macros that have a multi tool or single tool option. We usually make programs 1 thru 21 be single tool and program 22 is multi tool (on a 21 Tool machine). To touch off tool 5, run program 5... For multi-tool you set variables for the first and last tool in prog 22, hit cycle start and walk away. Another way we can do single tool is setting T to #3700 which is whatever is in the spindle.

BROTHERFRANK said:

Out here we use tool setting macros that have a multi tool or single tool option. We usually make programs 1 thru 21 be single tool and program 22 is multi tool (on a 21 Tool machine). To touch off tool 5, run program 5... For multi-tool you set variables for the first and last tool in prog 22, hit cycle start and walk away. Another way we can do single tool is setting T to #3700 which is whatever is in the spindle.

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Same setup on mine plus one one to offset from tool center, for a tool like a saw. Just enter the tool radius.

Congrats!
Your floor is too clean.

I sweep and mop every week! I also wipe down machines periodically, dust shelves, etc. I've seen what 20-30 years of neglect can do in a machine shop (or anywhere, really) and it is easier to spend 20-30 minutes a week than let it build up and have to spend hours or days getting it done later. The building is an investment property for some family members and me, so the more we put into rehabilitation and the more we do to keep it clean, the higher the premium we can command if I ever outgrow the size.

Plus I won't work in a shithole unless part of the deal is I get to make it better.

Installation is currently ongoing.

Also, to the member who tried sending a message, I cleaned out my inbox.

Installation and training finished up today. There were a few issues that needed sorting. The dual contact 16k spindle is only available as a field upgrade, so that took half a day. Part of that option is field-installation of the tool washdown system (it uses filtered coolant to flush the taper during a tool change so chips don't get stuck on the spindle face). There is evidently zero documentation available for the guys to follow, and the only diagram we could find in the Brother installation manuals is poorly drawn and not labeled at all. That ate a full day, and after comparing it to the installation on their local showroom machine, they came back today to just give it one more check to ensure it was done correctly.



The Blum electronic manuals conflict with the paper manuals that accompany the probe and toolsetter. Blum came in to assist and got them squared away but that is something else Yamazen should try to capture in their documentation. They were chasing some alarms due to following the hard copy wiring instead of the electronic manual. When I bought the Okuma, Renishaw sent a calibration tool as part of the package, and I bought one from Maritool as well. To avoid having two for this machine I waited until installation to see if Blum sent something. We got some kind of kit at the old shop but my memory was fuzzy. I ended up using a dowel in a dual contact holder and then going back and forth between the machine and CMM to get the tool lengths dialed in to match the spindle probe. Thanks to Frank at Maritool for verifying the measurements I got between the spindle face and the gauge line so the apps engineer had some confidence in our setup. Everything is within a thousandth for height so I'm good.

The training was excellent. Sure I've run these before but it has been a few years now, and I also had the tool setter macros customized for how I'm going to run my tool library. Unfortunately, the Speedio only has 99 tool offsets so I can't copy my setup from the Okuma. I still need to write program to combine all the probing calls into one place like I had at the old shop.

The 4th axis installation went well. I still need to decide on Jergens or Lang for my base plate, then I will machine it to fit the T200A pattern. I'm leaning towards Lang since I know their quality is top notch and they are surprisingly cheaper than Jergens. I'm going with a 96mm plate and a 96 to 52mm reducer, and a couple of vises to start with. I wanted to try the Orange vises but they don't offer a self-centering vise - only the lathe-jaw style serrated locating vises. One of my buddies has been using the Lang/Jergens base plates and 5th Axis vises to save some money on lower quantity run machines where the screws wearing out isn't an issue. Not sure I want to go that route. I like to buy once, cry once. I will eventually put 17" Orange vises on the table, maybe on top of 96mm raster plates, but for now I have some spare Kurt 3600Vs I will use.

I got the patrol light installed before the engineer got here this morning, along with the Maritool/Huot tool holder. I used thin weld nuts on the back side and sealed everything up with Permatex Ultra Gray so I should not have issues with leaks. The nuts clear the door by a very small margin.



I also made my first chips this afternoon. Just cut a few more spacers for the drops on my air piping (Rapid Air Fastpipe). Everything was dead on accurate, and holy hell I forgot how fast these things are. Easily half the cycle time as the same part in my Okuma. Different tools for different parts!





Baby's First Parts:



Full disclosure one is 0.025" thin because I forgot to offset in Y when I flipped the first one. Oops. I keep saying I'm not much of a machinist. Things like this keep me honest about that. Man I missed tapping at 6k.

Plenty of tweaks to make in the post processor but nothing that will be too difficult.

Looks like on th s700 you could move the 4th off the edge of the table quite a bit since it has such a long fixed way cover there. Would gain quite a bit of table space. Same on my tc-s2d-o. Not so on the S1000. The table goes very close to the enclosure on that.

Do you guys use a tail stock for the 4th axis ever? if so what do you use? I have a quote that I am about to pull the trigger on for pretty much the same setup you have here. The quotes mentions "no tailstock". I will be needing one, what are good options?

It is on my "to-do" list to build a sub plate that will hold the 4th off the table and also allow me to relocate the probe to the space behind where the 4th is now. I'm working on the designs.

TwnFinn said:

Do you guys use a tail stock for the 4th axis ever? if so what do you use? I have a quote that I am about to pull the trigger on for pretty much the same setup you have here. The quotes mentions "no tailstock". I will be needing one, what are good options?

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I can look back at other quotes that I got but Brother offers an "end support" I think it is called? There are hydraulic, pneumatic, or hand-operated units but I had no plans to use any. If I had table-spanning thinner fixtures planned I would have. I had no issues with fixture sag using Lang 96mm plates on the Yukiwa or Nikken 4ths at the old shop including an old Kurt rota-vise that was easily 16"+ long. We had those bolted to sub plates that were connected to the table so we had clearance for some larger parts but they didn't overhang.

TwnFinn said:

Do you guys use a tail stock for the 4th axis ever? if so what do you use? I have a quote that I am about to pull the trigger on for pretty much the same setup you have here. The quotes mentions "no tailstock". I will be needing one, what are good options?

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I have yet to find one that is even close to being right, so I roll my own. But I am awfully picky about this stuff. I like to hold my fixtures between the 4th and a pneumatic tailstock so I can swap fixtures with 15 to 20 seconds of spindle down time so "getting it right" is a big deal for me.

DavidScott said:

I have yet to find one that is even close to being right, so I roll my own. But I am awfully picky about this stuff. I like to hold my fixtures between the 4th and a pneumatic tailstock so I can swap fixtures with 15 to 20 seconds of spindle down time so "getting it right" is a big deal for me.

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Are you using a live center on the tailstock or something else? For my parts a pneumatic live center would be perfect. Did you make yours from scratch or start with something and modified it?

Do you know if it is possible you use Hainbuch collets on this? We use BZI 52 size on our lathe, it would be nice to be able to use the same ones. The catalog for the T200A doesn't seem to be available on the brother site (btw what a joke to try to download info on the website). And since I don't speak the same language here with the dealer here it makes it challenging to find out.