Hello all you EDM gurus,
I am a general noob when it comes to sinkers and EDM in general but I am trying to learn the art. We bought a used CNC sinker for our machine shop (it was cheap) in hopes of using it for the odd repair job or broken tap removal. No one here has EDM experience.
So I have been slowly working my way through the machine manuals (Heidenhain TNC 416 controller I believe) and have been able to figure out how to set up and run the machine without too much issue. But I am having issues figuring out how to nail the finished feature size. Before I go into more detail on that I should mention, I am not trying to hold tenths...if I can get +/- .001" I would be happy.
Say for instance I want to make a .400" square cavity, I choose the e-table that matches my electrode face surface area closest, which tells me I need to make the trode .010" small per side minimum. So I machine the trode to .376" and run the program expecting the cavity to be undersize by .004" (which I could then orbit to size) but the actual size never corresponds to my expectations. So I think I must be missing something.
My assumption is that I should be able to pick an e-table, pick the surface finish desired and run the cycle and the size should come out to the size of my trode + 2x the spark gap. But either I am reading my e-tables wrong or misunderstanding how the process works. Can someone run through how you would sink a simple cavity to size on your machine? I get that flushing has a huge effect on everything but I have a hard time imagining that is want is messing with me. I'm generally seeing variations in the area of .005" to .010" from expectation. So even something like sinking a keyway is not possible at this point.
Thanks in advance!
Levi
Sent from my SM-G965W using Tapatalk
I am a general noob when it comes to sinkers and EDM in general but I am trying to learn the art. We bought a used CNC sinker for our machine shop (it was cheap) in hopes of using it for the odd repair job or broken tap removal. No one here has EDM experience.
So I have been slowly working my way through the machine manuals (Heidenhain TNC 416 controller I believe) and have been able to figure out how to set up and run the machine without too much issue. But I am having issues figuring out how to nail the finished feature size. Before I go into more detail on that I should mention, I am not trying to hold tenths...if I can get +/- .001" I would be happy.
Say for instance I want to make a .400" square cavity, I choose the e-table that matches my electrode face surface area closest, which tells me I need to make the trode .010" small per side minimum. So I machine the trode to .376" and run the program expecting the cavity to be undersize by .004" (which I could then orbit to size) but the actual size never corresponds to my expectations. So I think I must be missing something.
My assumption is that I should be able to pick an e-table, pick the surface finish desired and run the cycle and the size should come out to the size of my trode + 2x the spark gap. But either I am reading my e-tables wrong or misunderstanding how the process works. Can someone run through how you would sink a simple cavity to size on your machine? I get that flushing has a huge effect on everything but I have a hard time imagining that is want is messing with me. I'm generally seeing variations in the area of .005" to .010" from expectation. So even something like sinking a keyway is not possible at this point.
Thanks in advance!
Levi
Sent from my SM-G965W using Tapatalk
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