Feeding’s Faster: Three Reasons to Avoid Slugging In the previous blog post, I offered four good reasons to save yourself some hard-earned cash and skip the bar feeder on your next lathe purchase. These include floor space, material waste, spindle speed limitations, bar preparation, and the not-insignificant cost of the bar feeder (I guess that’s five [...]
Slugging it Out: Four Arguments Against Bar Feeders Let’s pretend you just ordered a KLR-series 2-axis horizontal turning center from Kent CNC. Congratulations, but how are you going to keep it fed? One of the biggest decisions anyone can make upon ordering a new CNC lathe—whether it’s ours or someone else’s—is what kind of bar [...]
Keep Cool: 5 Things You Should Know About High-Pressure Coolant Systems If you’ve purchased a new end mill or slotting cutter lately, chances are good that it’s riddled with coolant holes. There’s an excellent reason for this. Unless you’re machining gray cast iron, high-carbon or hardened steels, or using ceramic cutting tools—cutting dry, in other words—you’ll [...]
Five Tips for Keeping Cutting Fluids in Tip-Top Shape Nobody likes a stinky machine tool. When cutting fluids are poorly maintained, anaerobic bacteria blossoms, feeding on the way lube and other unavoidable contaminants that collect within any machine sump. This is why Kent CNC’s KVR-series vertical machining centers are equipped with automatic coolant tank skimmers and [...]
3 Chip Management Tips for CNC Machine Operators There’s one basic rule of shop floor economics that everyone should know: if the machines aren’t making chips, the business is losing money. But the shape of those chips and their removal from the work area is every bit as important as producing them in the first place. [...]
Which Way? Linear or Box Way Vertical Machining Centers? Ask any machinist which is better, box ways or linear guideway machining centers, and you might receive a heated response, similar to asking them which sports team is best, or how they voted in the last election. Most have their favorite, and how it became that way [...]
Whether they visited IMTS or not, anyone who turns parts for a living knows there’s an entire new breed of machine tool coming down the pipe, one that’s making shops everywhere take a hard look at their turning operations. They’re known as mill-turn lathes, and sometimes multitasking machines—whatever you call them, these ultra-complex, twin-spindle, dual-turret, automatic tool-changing, [...]
Life is full of choices. From deciding what color to paint your bathroom, which combo meal to order at your favorite fast food restaurant, or whether to name your kid Bob or Jim, each of us is faced each day with decisions big and small. Machine shop life is no different. In many ways, the decisions [...]
Back when a 6,000 rpm CNC vertical machining center was considered ridiculously fast, there was little worry about heat buildup in the spindle. Thermal growth of the Z-axis was quite manageable, and the spindle bearings could be expected to last years before servicing became necessary. That all began to change as spindle speeds hit 8,000 rpm, [...]
I’ve always been a fan of those little “phone booth” style vertical machining centers. They’re fast, the toolholders are small and light, and for the most part they boast enough axis travel to machine a wide variety of workpieces. Granted, they can’t take a massive cut, but they make up for at least some of that [...]
