Semi OT - High Speed Machining - When did it first begin...?

Like the title suggests - When do you first remember seeing HSM in the shop...?

The reason I ask - I'm trying to write some articles for my new job, and am just generally curious what your experience has been.

I first remember seeing HSM around 2008. I was working in a toolroom inside a big factory, and we were using Mastercam. They had hired an independent trainer to teach us how to use Mastercam better, and I first remember seeing the trainer use a "peel milling" strategy to open up some slots.

My experience before that was simply that solid endmills were for manual machines, and for cutting slots, or finishing in a CNC mill. Roughing was done with indexables only.

Was that near the beginning of HSM really taking off, or had it been around for a while before that?

And while we're discussing history - What about High Feed Machining? I remember seeing this around 2009-2010, but my understanding was that HFM had been around since the early 90's.

I remember hearing/reading? that HFM was born in the mold & die sector. People were using round-insert "copy" mills, and learned that if they used smaller depths of cuts, they could feed faster. I *think* Seco launched their first official "High Feed" mill around the early 2000's...?

So when did you first see High Feed Machining in use?

First time I tried high feed was a 2 inch cutter in a 40 taper cartridge Spindle Machine that was well into the bearing life. 2.5 hours locked that Spindle tight as a ,,, ummm,, I don’t have else I ever found that tight....

Jashley73 said:

And while we're discussing history - What about High Feed Machining? I remember seeing this around 2009-2010, but my understanding was that HFM had been around since the early 90's.

I remember hearing/reading? that HFM was born in the mold & die sector. People were using round-insert "copy" mills, and learned that if they used smaller depths of cuts, they could feed faster. I *think* Seco launched their first official "High Feed" mill around the early 2000's...?

So when did you first see High Feed Machining in use?

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First time I saw high feed was probably around 2003-2004 if my memory is correct. I was an apprentice back then and we went past a company that made mag wheels. They had a small toolroom and the one toolmaker showed me how they finished their dies after heat treat. They had just put in a VMC that purely finished dies and I think that most of their tooling came from iscar. Sparks flying everywhere and I couldnt believe the actualy feed it was going at coming from a purely manual machining background back then.

HSM was at Electra mining/Machine tool Africa expo probably around the same time as you 2008 ish. Mastercam had a stand with a few machines and on one it was running. I was probably slow on the uptake of this because I only really tried it once onecnc had added it and I actually got a machine that could handle it.

It's more a matter of having controls, feedrates and acc/dec rates that can make it work well.
I began seeing more of both in the mid 80's from the places with cubic dollars to spend and certainly it predates this.
High feed single pass must go way back. I would think WWII or earlier. I designed my high feed milling cutter for auto production in the early 80s, and by the way rounds are not a good design for such.
High speed low side engagement also goes back probably to the beginning of milling machines. The handles kind of tell you that you can go faster.

Chip thinning is not a new development.
What is newer is the mass availability of CAM systems and higher speed machines priced at the consumer level.
Basically the microprocessor revolution.
CAD/CAM and CNC were once the realm of the privileged few.
Compare a PDP-8 to your cell phone in both price and power. Look at the rapids and max feedrates of today's machine tools and those of 1980.
Your company knew how to make these cutters long ago and did as specials on occasion. There just was not a mass market so not a catalog item.

Your point of view and timeline on this stuff is in fact very interesting to hear and I am in no way stepping on you.
Bob

CarbideBob said:

It's more a matter of having controls, feedrates and acc/dec rates that can make it work well

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exactly

the 1st step is to improve cinematics, when a normal movement is conected with a succumbed movement; as a result, for example, machine should not reduce speed drastically when a small segment is encountered ( like a 0.2 chamfer after a long line )

and an obvious question was there : what if the 3rd movement is also a succumbed movement ? then read-ahead buffer must be increased, so the machine should have finished computing the optimized cinematics long before their execution

*succumbed movement : a geometrical entity ( line or arch ) with it's length / ipw = f
f is a cnc characteristic; for example, a servo capable of breaking fast has a shorter ipw

each cnc producer has itw own way to deal with this ; welcome to hi-cut ( Okuma ) : optimizes transition cinematics

another obvious question is : what if all movements can be cataloged as succumbed movements ? for example high-res CAM outputs ; then read-ahead buffer must be increased and entire toolpath must be interpolated : welcome to nurbs ( Okuma )

and another : is it possible to change machining precision ? for example :
- is it possible to lower cnc precision during simple positioning, and increase it during machining complex shapes ?
- is it possible to rough with a lower precision and finish with an increased precision ?
* this is dynamic change of diff tolerance; it can be partially achieved on an Okuma control; i said partially, because only a small fraction of the process parameters are available to user input, and so, this can not be achieved anytime, anyhow ... but it is there

ps : i am sorry; my answer is not about the history

kalim said:

BLA BLA BLA
succumbed movement; as a result, for example, machine should not reduce speed drastically when a small segment is encountered OR A MACHINE THAT CANNOT THREAD UP TO A SHOULDER

and an obvious Some crap I didnt read BLA BLA BLAcomputing the optimized cinematics long before their execution

*succumbed movement : a geometrical entity ( line or arch ) with it's length / ipw = f
f is a cnc characteristic; for BLA BLA BLA shorter ipw

each cnc producer has itw own way to deal with this ; welcome to hi-cut ( Okuma ) : optimizes transition cinematics


( Okuma )
BLA BLA BLA cnc precision during simple positioning, and increase it during machining complex shapes ? this is dynamic change of diff tolerance; this can be partially achieved on an Okuma control

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Now I'm convinced, smells just like cat crap... All I want to know is in the real world when he gets told to "(INSERT EXPLICIT WORDS) OFF!" if he still hangs around just to irritate everyone more.

I just looked at my Mastercam training cert date and it is from 2006. I remember using 'peel mill' with Mastercam probably not long after that. I remember being amazed that the cutter was still relatively sharp, and how 'fast' (I'm sure I was running waaay conservative though LOL) the cut went, and at full depth.

I was using trochoidal paths and chip thinning as far back as 2006, and I'm sure many others were too before that. The question then is, when did people start calling it HSM?

Sandvik's Modern Metal Cutting, published in 1996, covered chip thinning in depth.

Bought my first high feed cutter around the same time, it was a 32mm Mits AJX. Still have it actually, used it yesterday!

I know that aerospace CAM programs like Catia had strategies to avoid excessive radial engagement in tight corners going back to the mid 1990s. I forget what they call it, curly cue corners or something. But, HSM strategies like we take for granted today were not really present. You had to manually draw out the tool path to force it to do "peel milling" or whatever others call it.

What is unbelievable to me is the massive amount of shops I have been into where they don't use HSM milling strategies at all. They are still plowing along with corn cob roughers and writing programs by hand with calculators and pencil and paper.

Even for one offs and tooling work, HSM is a god send. I use it where it's hardly needed just because I know it will work and there is a very small chance of breaking a tool or pulling a part out of the fixture.


Now, all that being said, things on the tooling side have changed dramatically since the mid 1980s. We have no started to swing back the other way. Variable helix, variable pitch, excellent high temperature coatings, etc have made full slotting at high speeds very economical. In easier to machine materials like aluminum, your limitation is spindle power and work holding, not tool life. With good aluminum specific coatings and high pressure coolant, 100% radial engagement and 200% axial engagement at 1000+ SFM are not just possible, they are considered conservative.

I recall a video from Emuge a few years ago where they were slotting tool steel with a 12mm cutter at full rapid on a brand new Hermle mill with just an air blast.

It's tough to keep up with the arms race that is constantly happening in machining.

I’ve been using PowerMILL for a decade plus, by now, and it was around before that. Like Gregor, I distinctly recall using Trochoidal tool paths and MasterCAM’s PEEL strategy a few years before jumping into Delcam. Going back, I’d have to think around 2005-ish. Possibly earlier. I seem to recall a plug in to NX that did similarly, back then, too. Really sifting the detritus this morning, though. I’ll need more coffee...

CarbideBob - I'm singling you out as an outlier (in a good way) because of your experience.

I certainly agree that more affordable machines would be a big factor in HSM, and likewise HFM. I hadn't thought about it until you pointed it out, but you're certainly correct.

I guess what I'm more curious about, is when did this start becoming commonplace for places without huge coffers? I'm guessing late 80's for the big dogs, mid 90's for larger factories with deep pockets, and early 2000's for smaller shops.

Certainly not new in theory I guess. I'm just wondering when it became widespread...



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Ecclesiastes 1:9 - What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

ewlsey said:

I know that aerospace CAM programs like Catia had strategies to avoid excessive radial engagement in tight corners going back to the mid 1990s. I forget what they call it, curly cue corners or something.are not just possible, they are considered conservative.

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We use Catia at my former school part and assembly design and CNC machining. Tool paths are associated with part geometry, make a change and paths update. But I NEVER hear Catia machining mentioned here. There is a Catia machining group doing impressive stuff but its pretty obscure from what I see here.

kalim said:

ps : i am sorry; my answer is not about the history

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Nope your answer IS about the smell of fecal material though. Specifically from a Feline. People know you are Deadlykitten, you are still the same and posting the same garbage. Are you trying to annoy me?

706jim said:

We use Catia at my former school part and assembly design and CNC machining. Tool paths are associated with part geometry, make a change and paths update. But I NEVER hear Catia machining mentioned here. There is a Catia machining group doing impressive stuff but its pretty obscure from what I see here.

Click to expand...

The obscene cost of Catia CAM keeps it out of widespread use. Unless you are Boeing, Dassult, a major automotive OEM, or tier 1 supplier, you can't afford Catia.

Sort of the same story for NX from Siemens (formerly Unigraphics).

There are other CAM software packages like HyperMill and Esprit that are very powerful, but very expensive and targeted to very specific niches like 3D mold cutting or 5 axis.

Makino were doing some high speed things in the early 90s when I first saw it. They had an external PC running a program that "pre-processed" the G-code program and "inserted" it into the Fanuc control at some internal processing level. It was pretty cool and unique. Don't know of any customers that bought it though.

You're right about the age of machines playing a big part of not being able to do high speed Machining because of the Accel, decel parameters, and the ability to only look 4 to 10 blocks ahead,,didn't help. Haha! Just for a comparison with Mazak we have a v515-40n (1994) and a (2014) 510C-50 nexus 2 and if you try to run the high speed Machining that we have through Gibbs cam the older 515 will take way longer and be harder on tools Because by the time it starts to cut it's already done with it in the whole time it's accelerating through because it takes that long to get up to speed versus the new mazak which is lightning fast and performance perfectly with today's high speed Machining. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say mazak didn't come up to par with high speed Machining until the late 90s with the M plus control. Today we have 400 volt Servo Motors versus 100 or 200 volt Servo Motors of yesteryear. As for cam software we always used Gibbs cam, and we started with 1998 then got 2004 and now 2017 and we didn't see the high speed Machining option come out in Gibbs until we renewed it 2017. So I'm going to take a wild guess and say that high speed Machining really then come alive until five years ago about?

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I am going to take a crack at this. I was in college doing my cam programming course in Gibbs. The high speed machining that was being taught was that of a 10-20 percent stepdown based on cutter diameter and crank the sfm and cpt. Gibbs had a special option to do a angular down ramp on so you were not leading on and off the part. you could go like 60-100 percent width of cut tho. This was like 2009. This was outside profiling. trochoidal paths were after that for gibbs.

That is hard to pin down but I would say this has been going on close to 20 years. I have been in the 5 axis department for the last 17 years and a few years before that is when it started for me. I was beating up an old Hurco and at the time a guy from Jabro stopped in with a fancy new endmill with a coating on it! He encouraged me to try to mill a pocket with it in hard S-7, after laughing at his face we did it together, soon afterwords I apologized and have been highspeed hardcutting ever since. I am sure he was not the first, just the first I know of.