Can these parts be made with live tooled or swiss type lathe?

Hi,

hopefully the topic of this thread is not meaningless, but I didn't figure out better one.

So here's the picture of the parts I made about a year ago.



Material is round stock diameter of 10mm and one quarter is milled away, length is 50 mm. Material was some ferritic heat resistant steel. Dimensions are not so critical... these are going to be welded.

I made 2200 pcs. First cut stock to pieces with ~1m lenght, then clamped to milling machine using 4 similar cheap drill vises, and cut the quarter off. I tilted the head to 45 degrees and used 100mm diameter shoulder mill with apkt-inserts. Then put 18 milled stocks together and sawed to 50mm pieces.

The milling and sawing took about 40 hours... Then I had idea that I'll build a rotary tumbling machine using couple of plactic buckets (thanks for youtube :-), yeah... but I't really didn't work out so I endend up grinding the edges... I think it took about 12 hours, but it's not so important.

Well since this job I've had an idea of building a special machine for making these... but there's many buts here... So first of all, could these be made using lathe with live tooling or will there be issues with too much hangout of the stock? So with swiss type lathe the stick out wouldn't be problem?... maybe there's a problem with live tooling and reaching close to spindle? So if it's possible, could you estimate cycle time for one piece?

Other buts are about how much is yearly usage and so on... but those are mainly the things I have to deal with the customer (if this leads to something at some point). But let's say hypothetically that the usage might be 50 000 ... 100 000 pcs/year. So any thought about other considerable manufacturing processes are interesting (for example I thought about cold forging from 8mm stock).

Best Regards
Timo

You are making these complete in about 1.4 minutes with inexpensive equipment. Sounds like a money maker the way you are doing it; why spend serious money to make them in 1 minute?

Red James said:

...why spend serious money to make them in 1 minute?

Click to expand...

100,000pcs of manual handling and operation? I'd be looking to automate it too... To be entirely honest I'm not sure I'd have had the patience to finish his first batch...

Yes a sliding head lathe or a live tool turning centre could churn those parts out, but probably not the most cost effective means unless you already have one sitting idle.

How about a simple PLC driven cutting line? Stationary milling head, push the bar through on a guide underneath it, shear or cut off blade on a slide. As quantities grow you could integrate a decoiler and run it off of reels.

the only thing I can contribute is a warning.

It's been my bitter experience, that you can tool up for a high volume ''dead cert'' job, only to have it evaporate a few weeks or months in.

A thought ;-

You could do that on an ordinary ram capstan with a simple milling head on the rear crosslide cut off the front, and a support widget on one of the turret faces, length stop another and spring loaded deburr tool another. So automating from that scenario, shouldn't be difficult.

I like Red James ideas.

But to keep costs down until you are sure the job will keep running, you could plane the sticks with a relatively simple fixture. Or same on a bed mill, if you have access. The planer cutter could be ground to include a de-burr feature; or fit with a secondary spring loaded de-burr tool. My little planer will do 2050 mm sticks, e.g.

If you keep doing the parts on a mill, switch to a horizontal with a bigger cutter; ditch the vises and make a full length fence and a key to hold the work, same as if doing it on a planer. This will most effectively resist the work tendency to warp upwards as stress is relieved in the rolled bars.

From that point I don't know if batch sawing as you do now, or a simple automated cold saw would give the least burr, so that the parts could be tumbled from that point. Worst case, run the sticks from the planer through a turret lathe with a cut-off tool that includes a deburr cutter at least for the OD. From there the parts could be tumbled.

Here is the fixturing suggestion for a horizontal mill or planer. The key way in a leadscrew is being planed. The other oversize rod holds it in place. But the point is, hold the work right on the bed of the machine, and make full length keystone shaped fence and "jaw" to hold the work. If the "jaw" is wide enough, it will only require a few T-slot bolts, or key it to the table and use toggle clamps to actuate it.

Either machine, put an end stop to resist the work shoving out, so you can max the feeds and speeds.



smt

Extrusion?

You didnt say whether you made money or not on the first 2200 pieces.

While it could be done on swiss lathe, its not really a lathe job in my opinion...there is no turning operation other than parting. The interrupted parting operation would be hard on tools.

If you made money on the first batch, you could reduce your time per piece by 4-5 times simply by gang milling on a horizontal.

If a saw cut finish & tolerance is acceptable, you would be way ahead of how you made the last batch.

I would make a fixture with five V grooves the length of the mill table, with quick release clamps, and gang mill 5 pieces per pass.
Then bundle the milled stock with metal strapping and weld the ends , and take them to the saw.
Invest in a better deburring set up if necessary, or send the cut pieces out for deburring.

You would be shocked at how fast a simple part like that would be done with 4 milling tools (end mill and 3 chamfer mills) on a Swiss lathe. You'd be even more shocked at how fast and affordable JG400 would spit them out on his multi-spindle Index machines. With those he'd put an end mill to cut the notch in one shot, one chamfer mill to remove the burr from the front end, another to deburr the notch edges and the third to deburr the back end after cutoff.