Lathe & Tooling

[adampaskowitz]

We had a purchasing process go haywire. We ordered a very nice pair of Haas machines - a toolroom mill and lathe, along with all necessary tooling. Unfortunately, only the lathe was ordered properly, and now we have to buy the tooling piece by piece, which is something nobody on the team knows anything about. Any suggestions on which tools & holders are most frequently used in FIRST? For those teams with lathes, how have they helped you ? What types of parts have they enabled you to make that otherwise would have been difficult?

[Mr. Mike]

A few questions first.
What model of Haas machines did you receive? What tooling do you have so far? Now for the important part. What experience does the group have with machine tools?

[Mk.32]

Tooling and tool holders: http://www.maritool.com/ is a good place.
We have an manual lathe and it's great for anything round, spacers, shafts, pulleys, etc. You can do a lot on the lathe that you can't/really don't want to do on a mill; even with an 4th axis.

Sounds like quite the setup you guys got. What kinda tools depends on what you guys know/like to use and what parts you want to make. I echo Mike's question, what kind of experience do you guys have with fabrication?

[ebarker]

It may be useful to go to this website The Innovation Center and checkout the Shopcraft videos from MIT.

There is a lot of information about how to use your equipment.

[Cory]

So you need tooling for the mill only? Did you get the toolchanger? When you say tooling, do you need toolholders/workholding/cutting tools, or just some subset? Do you have any experience with CNC machine tools?

I've previously recommended Maritool. They are the best value out there when it comes to toolholders, at a fraction of the price of the well established brands.

You'll have 3 basic kinds of toolholding needs. Drills/taps/reamers, end mills, and face mills.

Face mills require a dedicated arbor, like this

Endmills can be held a number of ways. You can use a collet chuck, which requires a different collet for each size tool you want to use. These offer the best accuracy, but can be less rigid or have trouble holding onto tools during heavy roughing (not going to be an issue on your TM). end mill holder are specific to a given tool size and can be more rigid than collet chucks, but are inherently less accurate since the tool is not perfectly on centerline. This is likely not a big deal for what you're doing. There are a number of other solutions such as milling chucks and hydraulic chucks, but given your machine's limitations they aren't gonna do much for you.

Drills/taps/reamers are best held in collet chucks. You can use a drill chuck, but it's less accurate and has less holding power. If you do use a drill chuck, make sure it's rated for the top speed of your machine-otherwise it can either open up, or the chuck can fall off the arbor entirely. Absolutely do not use a drill chuck with taps.

We have a machine with a 20 tool toolchanger. Our initial toolholder purchase was 6 ER-32 collet chucks, 6 ER-16 collet chucks, 1 1/16"-1/2" keyless drill chuck, and a face mill arbor.

We expanded from there and purchased 2 set screw end mill holders by 1/8" of each size from 1/4" to 3/4", added a second face mill, and probably another 8 to 10 ER-16 collet chucks, along with some specialty toolholders.

We keep all our commonly used tap/clearance drills and taps in dedicated holders. Not all fit in the machine at once, but since they never leave their holders it only takes seconds to swap them into the machine. I don't really like using the drill chuck and only leave it in the machine for that oddball drill that needs to be used once, just so I don't have to free up a collet chuck and find the right collet.

Same thing with common endmills. We're normally machining aluminum or plastic, for which we have specific cutting tools. We'll often keep common steel specific tools (like 1/4" ball/flat end mills for pocketing out steel gears) set up in toolholders outside the machine to save time later.

I would suggest starting with a drill chuck, face mill arbor, and some ER collet chucks. That gives you a pretty versatile collection. You can add other toolholders as you need them (like endmill holders for specific sizes you find yourself using a lot). It would help to know what you envision yourselves using the machine for, as well as how much you have to spend.

I would also suggest finding a local community college to take CNC classes from. I'm not sure where these are relative to you, but the community colleges on this list should offer classes using HAAS machinery.