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New Machine Day - Cnc router

macgyver

Stainless
Joined
Aug 2, 2012
Location
Pittsburg, KS
Well, it finally happened, I was able to have the new to me router delivered this past week and set it place. As of today I do not have it powered up yet, but should very soon.

I figure that I would post it up here to do a little show and tell, maybe spark some more discussion on the routers and I figure that I can tell my reasons for why I did what I did.

The machine I bought is a 1992 Komo, it was built in MN, it is a multi spindle machine with a 5x8 table and a Fanuc OM control. For me a lot of the decision to look for this brand in particular was due to running one at my old job for many years. The top things I was looking for in a used machine for me was an american made 24/7/365 duty cycle machine, common control, and of course within my budget while still in good shape. I had set my budget for $25k or under, partly from watching the market the past year and also what I was comfortable with for a loan. That did not make for a very large market to shop from. I watched the auctions and any kind of ads for a long time while working on the financing for it. I would have preferred a tool changer, but I am very comfortable with the multi spindle machine, I can make it do what I want to and for very high production parts you can't beat multiple spindles cutting at the same time. For me the priority was a machine that I felt was extremely reliable vs ultimate speed and bells and whistles. Again, I know the Komo's pretty well and had developed a good network of techs etc of the people that know them. I am comfortable with the Fanuc and I am going to program in the office. This machine is not the fastest thing out but will keep running as long as I take care of it. I had a couple others that I was in charge of at the old job and while they were very fast etc, they were also high strung and needed more upkeep than I was happy about. One had the PC front end and a nice pretty touch screen. Well, the touch screen/PC went out on it and was very expensive to replace. Also since it was the control it had to have all the parameters loaded back in. Not a great experience, so when I went shopping for mine, I wanted something else and I kept reverting back to this generation of Komo.
I also wanted a heavy built machine that could take some heavy cuts and some heavy tooling. I had a little bit of time on some others (Busellato, Thermwood, Motionmaster) and they were just not in the same class of machine, all the components were much smaller and lighter duty. I want to be able to cut aluminum and solid wood without a worry about the machines capacity.
I know that this machine is lacking in a couple areas and I plan to address them in the future with another machine next to it. Namely one that has much more Z and a control that will handle 3D surfacing and huge amounts of code easily, but first things first.

So, onto new machine day: I had alot of things seem to get in the way of physically getting it home and it took me longer than I had hoped to resolve the issues. The machine is 11x24ft and weighs just under 24,000 lbs. The transport to my shop was the easy part, it was the rigging off the truck into the shop that gave me problems. If you don't know, I have set up shop in a old grocery store and there was not a large door in it or any kind of approach to that nonexistent door, just loose gravel. The big thing that messed up my budget was the power lines above the door to my shop. This meant that they could not get close to the building with the machine, so they proposed bringing some steel plates and building it up level with the floor so that they could set the machine on it, then skate it in. By the time we added up the machines, plates, riggers and number of hours estimated, their initial quote doubled what I had budgeted. So, I spent too many nights trying to come up with a cheaper way to do it. In the end I wasted alot of time. It ended up taking half the time to get it in and the price was actually within a couple hundred of my budget. They showed up at 8 AM and left at 11 AM. They used their 50 ton crane, and I had a neighbor bring his big forklift to set the plate. There was a comm link missing somewhere and they only brought one plate so we ended up building a railroad to run it in on. It honestly was probably as quick as setting multiple plates. My baby Datsun couldn't pull it off the plate, so the neighbor pushed with his outside and once it got inside, I could move it easily with mine. We had to go app 35ft then turn 90 deg and go another 30 ft. It is wider than my door, so I had to pull part of the wall down too. That was the hardest part of my day.
Still alot of remodeling to finish and get my hobbies in another location, but I am happy with where we are so far.

Jumpy video and pics here: Moving Komo Into Shop Photos by macgyver37 | Photobucket

Thanks for looking

Jason
 

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What are CNC routers usually used for? I have been working in machine shops for the last 17 years and have never ran across one, but I see them mentioned from time to time. thanks
 
ARB - yes, they can be fun, I hope that this one is too.

Doug - yes, this one is bigger than I had hoped as to footprint. It is crazy to compare this one with a 5x8 to the footprint of the CR Onsrud we had with a 5x12 table, the Onsrud is smaller. The Komo has the long bridge so that all the heads can cover the whole table. I am already scheming on how to add on to the table to make it 10 ft. It is 10-6 under the bridge. Right now the bulk of what I have work for is in the plastics area, but I will be doing some door parts for an entry door company that my buddy works at soon. I may be adding a horizontal spindle to it to do mortises. It will be getting a new subplate with the NEMI grid on it, makes for very quick changeovers. I will also be drilling and tapping for kurt style vises to go on it. In other words, whatever comes in the door that I think I can make money on. I have a few products that I have in mind that I need to get a handle on whether they will sell or not too.

munruh - a cnc router is very much like a cnc mill, usually the difference is the work envelope is much larger and the feed/speeds are much higher. They are intended to be used to cut wood, plastic, and non ferrous metals. They usually have a vacuum table too. Around here there are not any shops that have what I would call standard metal working machines and routers too, they usually don't mix in this area. I am weird in that I play with all three materials. Some examples of use; pattern machining, thermoform part trimming, sign shop work, carving, moldings (like architectural molding,trim) honestly anything that you can get on the table.
 
Doug, this control will do the surfacing, the main problem is that it has a small amount of memory and while it will drip feed, it does not do it as well as if the program is broken up into smaller bites and running right out of the control. I am basing this off of when we tried it before 2007 when I got a new machine. Then we could write a program and drip feed it and it would process it very slowly, if we took the exact same program and broke it into 49K sections, it would run it full speed and without any issues at all. There may be some people here that can get me drip feeding properly.

The OM is the base model Fanuc control. I am assuming that the better models of Fanuc don't have this problem. When this router was built, there were not many doing the 3D surfacing that is fairly common now.

Jason
 
Congratulations on the new machine. That is quite a footprint.

My new machine came in a week and a half ago and keeping track of one spindle is enough for me right now.
 
I was going through my old threads looking for something else and thought I might update this one a little.

Now that I have had the machine 7+ years I can say that it has no problem drip feeding. I got the free software NCLink to load programs and got a member here to make me a cable and I set the parameters to match the PC and the cnc and it runs drip fed programs just like native to the control programs. I don't know what was going on with the machine at my old job, but mine has none of those troubles.

Also, over these 7 years I have had to replace the CRT, got a used one from a member on here for cheap. I have had to replace the servo amp for Z, I think it is a bad capacitor. I found a used amp on eBay and got it going for cheap. I did get a new cap to replace the old one to see if that fixes it but never have yet.

I did have some head scratching for awhile trying to figure out an issue I was having and after a couple weeks I finally found out it was a bad cable in the chain track. I have since replaced 3 cables and I am planning on doing another soon for #4 spindle. For some reason 28 years of cycles finally wore out the cables.

I have ran lots of surfacing programs for weird stuff like 3D displays, vacuum forming molds etc. I have ran custom curved crown molding profiles, cabinet parts and cut literally tons of plastic. Done lots of sign work, cut some aluminum and did some engraving on some steel plates that were 6x7ft. Set up double vises and drilled holes 2 parts at a time in a run of 1600 brackets I welded.

Passively looking for another one for redundancy. I ended up buying app 50% of another one that got scrapped before I knew about it, so I got all the stuff they saved, all the control, spindles, vac pump and any extra goodies. So that is giving me a nice net.

Overall tickled with the machine.
 








 
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