Figured I would ask the CD community before spending hours searching the internet looking for something I may not be able to find.
In years past we purchased the Velox CNC QMTC (Quick Manual Tool Change) tool holders for use with our CNC Router.
I’m looking to expand our tool library and with Velox out of business I can’t just purchase additional QMTC units. Does anyone in the community know where Velox got their products or of any similar products that would fit the need? I tried reaching out to Velox in May of 2021 to see if they still had any stock they were willing to sell, but unfortunately never got a response.
Would prefer to keep with the ER16 collet system that the existing QMTC use, but kind of open to whatever options that are out there at this point.
Sometimes it just helps to know exactly what to search for! Thanks for the links!
Do you have any experience with specific models / brands? Kind of worried about runout on these basic ones that end up being like 1/4 of the price of what the Velox ones were.
Or what looks to be the same as above at 5x for $109 (which is more expensive then the individual?)
I’m going to reach out to CME and see if they have the TIR available for either of those products.
And last I found these - (link removed due to potential security concern) at $30 a piece with a claimed TIR <= .00008 (which I find hard to believe based solely on the price?)
Thank you!
I’m going to try the CME tools one. Not particularly spooked by a lack of TIR claims in products to be used in FRC environments. We don’t really worry about holding anything better than 0.002" on anything, with the exception of drive rail bearing bores - which we ream to exact size rather than try to get right directly off the machine these days.
I have used the cheap ones for work and for 1678 without any major issues in years. 12mm is close enough to 1/2" that you can just go for it, it’s what I always do anyway. @s-neff @Zstack836
So we recently got a Tormach 24R, and it’s great except for the fact it has no ATC so tool changes are a bit of a pain. Can you explain how these QMTC are meant to be used?
My guess is that you’d load the spindle up with your ER collect’s largest size, lets say 1/2", then you’d have a bunch of these QMTC pre loaded with your different collet sizes/bits, that way you only have to loosen/tighten the main spindle collet?
If this is the case has anyone noticed any perceptible TIR increase/needing to use slower/less aggressive tool paths?
Your explained use case is exactly correct. We preload all of the QMTC with our individual tools (4mm, 1/8, 1/4, wood, plastic, etc) and just swap the QMTC when we do a tool change. All of our tools are loaded into Mach3 with the tool offsets so we can zero once and just go.
We have not noticed any TIR that would impact our feeds/speeds. That being said, we have never run anything different so I’m not sure I have a good comparison. Our standard porter cable router does not exactly support any ER system.
This is 100% how these are used. You can keep saved tool offsets this way the same as you would on a machine with a tool carousel. There is some additional runout but I haven’t had any real issues with it myself. You do need to go a little slower because of the additional stickout length, but you are generally going to be more limited by your endmill and machine rigidity first.
Thank you both for the quick responses, we gotta pick up a few of these to test out!
How would you account for this in lets say GWizard, you typically have to enter the OAL as well as stick out, would the stickout just be from tip of the bit to spindle nose? For the OAL would you use the OAL of the endmill? Or add the OAL of the QMTC to it? (I don’t have GWizard in front of me right now so maybe it’s a bit more self explanatory then i’m making it)
We’ve been getting 100-150ipm (0.125 DOC, 1/4" 3FL) on our 24R with lakeshore carbide tooling which has been both scary and amazing, just want to figure out how much this would impact those speeds.
Edit: I was able to snip a picture of the tool settings and was curious how you’d fill in the stickout and overall length when using one of these, and I guess Shank Diameter would be the smaller of the 2 diameters?
I am jealous of those speeds, wish our routers could come close to that. I have never used GWizard so I am not sure how best to persuade the correct values to throw into the correct fields. You could always do some FMA math on the cross sectional area stiffness of the holder and equate it to a smaller stickout worth of tool shank.
6061-T6 Aluminum
We’re using 2D adaptive paths, on our last run we were playing with 24K RPM, 115ipm for 1570 surface speed, 0.0016" FPT, with an optimal load of 0.05" using a 0.25" 3 Flute Variable Helix endmill from lake shore carbide.
We’re used to our 2 axis bridge port with a floppy disk and super limited program sizes, so being able to use “proper” helical, ramps, lead ins/outs and HSM tool paths at these speeds is all new to us so it’s very possible we’re doing bad things to our tools, but so far so good as we can tell.
Thats close to our router numbers as well, might be able to push a bit harder if you got someone watching it closely.
Those look like good numbers on a stiff machine, our routers would have a fit and chatter horribly if we tried running that hard unfortunately. 2D Adaptive is MAGIC!!!
