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Cincinnati Milacron Hawk 150, what to expect?

Temo

Plastic
Joined
Feb 25, 2013
Location
Pomona, Ca
Hi to all,

An opportunity came up to buy a Cincinnati Milacron Hawk 150, if you have one, can you share the good and bad experiences with this model?

Thanks.
 
I had many of them in the 90's and early 2000's. During that time frame the Hawk was the equivalent to the Okuma LB series. They are beast of a machine when it comes to spindles, and the tailstock is the most robust I have ever used on a 2X lathe. The tailstock is a pin in turret drag type and it must weigh about 1500#s. if you push it back and the pin is in the wrong hole you have to make a bracket out of flat bar to connect it to the turret to pull forward again impossible for 3 people to budge it.

The turret was a little under thought out IMO. It's on a Duplomatic system and uses a Cincinnati specific block thats not cheap. Dont crack the window. it's 3/4" aviation glass and in 2000 was $1600 a pop. The coolant system may as well be ripped out and replaced with a higher flow. The factory pump is a multi stage pump that once it gets a few chips inside its all down hill. It has a nice sensor for alignment on the turret that lets you know once its out .001. To re-align just pop the cover off and loosen 8 SHCS's and put the alignment taper pins in then re-tighten and off you go.

I bought my first (3) to do a job that was 2" 304 6" long with a 1-3/4 blind drill 5-7/8" deep. 250,000 pieces, face, Drill with Kyocera magic drill in one shot, bar push, cutoff and repeat. Ran those 24-7 and never had any alarm unless a drill melted in the hole, but that A2100 control usually eliminated that before it became a problem.

My family split the business and in 2000 my cousin started turning and threading the forged shackle pins for CM. He bought a couple of Hark 150's and 200's and here we are 22 years later and they are still doing the same job from 1/4' to 4". Those trim lines on a large forged bolt are brutal and those Cinci's never miss a beat.

The A-2100 control. IMO that it is to this day the finest control ever made. The trade off was when it comes to dependability it sucks. Super fragile, and the HD's are hard to come by and expensive. The pc side consist of two mother boards connected with a bridge board and the bridge was prone to cooking in non climate controlled shops. The control has 99K work offsets so odds are you wont run out. The tool monitor is lighting fast so if you crunch an insert it knows it and locks everything up in a blink of any eye. It has this graph that you can observe and the control is running some algorithm in the background based on the graph and if it changes suddenly it stops the axis and the spindle and sends you an alert that somethings not right. (

RAP) Resident Assist Programming is a slick conversational side that spits out G-code as you tap on what you want. The built in Fanuc translator will translate most any Fanuc code to the Siemens code instantly. Watch out for M6.1, the 2100 doesnt use TXXXX to call and activate. You set where you want the turret to index then just use M6.1 and no need for clearance move. But, leave out the .1 and it indexes in place.

All in all, great machine and if you find one in good shape for a decent price it will serve you well. Oh, the machine is on a 3 point footing so never has to be leveled. I had the air and power pre ran and from the time the riggers set it in place to training was around and hour or two. Now the bar feed is a different story.
 
Thanks for the reply, lots of good points that I'll keep an eye on. Machine is 2002 and have 600 hrs of operation and the owner have an extra hard drive. Long story short, he bought the machine as non operation and fixed step by step.
 








 
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