Buying a milling machines - Jewelry Discussion

Hi Rose,

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I use Rhino to do the CAD work for the Knew Concepts saws, before we
convert them over to talk to our machining center. There&#;s a whole
lot of hand coding involved in that, unfortunately. (Our CAM package
spits out spaghetti code. Since we&#;re doing many of the same parts,
it&#;s worth my while to go through and optimize the code by hand. A
few seconds per part may not matter much if you&#;re only making two.
If you&#;re doing thousands, it matters a lot.)

I looked at the MicroMill, or what I think you mean by &#;MicroMill&#;.
Were you talking about the Taig micromill?

Depending on the size of what you&#;re doing, and your intent, the
Taig might not be enough of a machine. The websites I found showed
some pretty serious people, with serious measuring tools, setting
theirs up by hand in ways that made it look more like a kit of parts
than a turnkey system.

Are you thinking of machining wax for casting, or metal directly? If
metal, than you need a much more serious tool than you would for
wax.

I was demoing the KC saws in the Otto Frei booth at JCK in Vegas a
couple of months ago, and I&#;m friends with the guy they had demoing
the Roland system. If you&#;d like, contact me directly, and I can put
you in touch. (I didn&#;t pay much attention to it: it was on the other
side of the booth, and I was demoing our stuff.)

If you need really &#;high resolution&#; you&#;re talking a ballscrew
machine, which immediately puts you in the $10K+ range.

As far as writing toolpaths by hand, it&#;s not&#;horribly hard,
provided you know the basics of running a milling machine by hand to
start with. (I sometimes describe it as like trying to run a
Bridgeport with mittens on.) The kinky part is that while GCode may
be more-or-less universal, every controller has their own
implementations of it, so you&#;ll have to learn to speak with
whatever accent your controller requires, and the smaller machines
tend to have weird controllers.

Writing 3 axis code by hand isn&#;t all that hard. I&#;ve never tried 4
or 5 axis code, but for anything beyond simple "rotate and drill"
sorts of things, I think that&#;s where I&#;d really want to have a
CAD package talking to a CAM package, spitting out code for the mill,
before I started hand tweaking it.

The biggest issue with writing code by hand (or trusting the CAM
package not to foul it up) is to make sure you don&#;t crash the head
into anything at any great rate of speed. You can do shockingly
large amounts of damage in terrifyingly little time if you slip a
zero somewhere.

If you&#;re talking about direct machining of the metal, try hard to
find a machine with a tool changer (and magazine). Of course, that
immediately puts you into the &#;costs much more than a car&#; world,
but for production work, there simply isn&#;t another choice.

For whatever that&#;s worth.
Brian.

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Diamond v. Carbide : Weighing the Costs and Benefits

Under the right conditions and with proper maintenance and handling, significant cost savings can be achieved by running polycrystalline diamond (PCD) tooling.   Understanding the basics of diamond tooling is important when contemplating its use in your own production line.  First and foremost, think of it as the marathon runner, as it will yield the best results in continuous and steady cutting of homogeneous materials. Diamond tooling is not advisable as an all-round tool that will be required to meet demands of a wide range of cutting applications on a day to day basis.  So, if you are machining different materials and want one tool to do it all, the diamond tool will not be able to excel as well as it will if you are machining, for instance, 3/4&#; MDF all day long.

Polycrystalline diamond is manufactured in a high-pressure, high-temperature laboratory process that fuses diamond particles onto a carbide substrate, which, in turn, allows the diamond to be brazed onto a tool body.  PCD has an exceptionally high wear resistance factor, in particular with abrasive composite materials that are often difficult to machine with carbide.  Examples are:  particleboard, MDF, OSB, high pressure laminate, phenolic, fibre glass etc.  Depending on what material is being machined, it is not unheard of for a diamond tool to outrun carbide by a ratio of 300 : 1!  Nevertheless, when deciding whether to switch, be conservative in your cost analysis and base your decision on the diamond bit lasting 25x longer than carbide.  You won&#;t be disappointed!

The original developers of synthetic diamond were GE (Specialty Materials Division) and DeBeers  (Element 6) who pioneered this process and mastered the know-how of synthesizing diamond for industrial cutting applications.  Meanwhile, there are a number of synthetic diamond tool blank manufacturers, and the quality, durability and wear resistance is not always equal.

When shopping for a PCD tool, it is important to discuss your proposed use and expectations in detail with the tool manufacturer as this allows for selection of the proper PCD grade (grain size), and optimum tool design.  In particular,  you want to be certain that there is no more PCD on the tool than actually needed (i.e. don&#;t order a tool with 1.1/4&#; cut length when you only cut 3/4&#; material because that needlessly increases the tool cost.

To understand the complete picture and compare &#;apples to apples&#; when shopping, it is important to ask the following questions:
How many times will I be able to sharpen this tool under normal wear conditions?
What will it cost to sharpen this tool?
How long will it take to turnaround a tool when sharpening?

If you neglect to get answers to these questions,  you might be in for a surprise to find you were sold a &#;disposable&#; tool that cannot be sharpened at all, or can only be sharpened once.  Or, you might think you are getting a bargain when you buy the tool, only to find you are going to be expected to pay 50% of the new tool cost to get it sharpened.

These factors significantly affect the cost per linear foot machined so are important to know when doing a cost comparison or justification for PCD tooling.  Below is an example of a cost comparison using a diamond saw blade versus a carbide tipped blade:

$./$. = PCD costs 19.6% of carbide when comparing $/Linear Foot (80.4% cost reduction) 

Another advantage of PCD tooling, apart from the longer tool life,  includes the quality of finish which is often significantly improved and therefore requires less sanding.  With carbide tools, the finish starts to deteriorate from the very first cut onward, whereas the diamond tool maintains a nice clean finish right up until it becomes dull&#;..at which time it plummets and should be pulled for sharpening.  Pushing a diamond tool to run a little longer once it shows signs of becoming dull  (a good indicator is when the machine amps increase), can result in a substantially larger sharpening cost as the diamond face can shatter and require re-tipping/replacing of the cutting edge.

At first glance PCD tooling seems expensive when compared to carbide however when we compute the cost per linear foot machined, in the right application, PCD will be revealed as the only choice for discerning shops that are cost conscious.  As you can see from the cost calculation above, the investment in PCD tools pays off rather quickly. Some of the top PCD applications are machining abrasive materials, composites and workflows that do high volume of the same cut and material type.

With PCD router bits, maintaining correct chip load is very important as heat buildup during the cut will damage the diamond and can lead to tool failure.  Accurate tool clamping systems with close tolerances are also essential as is firm material hold down to avoid any vibration during the cut.   For specific questions about PCD tooling, please contact us or give us a call at 1-800-544-

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