From X2 to Small Footprint Vertical Machining Center (VMC) · Apr 29, 00:43
It’s been quiet here in the shop lately as we’ve been looking up and down the coasts, from east to west, for a real vertical machine center. It was bound to happen sooner or later :)
With such a small shop space and being somewhat dimensionally-challenged, we went from looking at drill/tap centers such as the Brother TC-221, 223, 227, 228, 229 models and up to the Fanuc RoboDrill T10, 12, 14 Alpha, Beta, and the variants. There are so many models to choose from that it’s nearly impossible to choose. One thing did help… talking to a Brother/Yamazen engineer convinced us that while the older Brother drill/tap centers are cool, the controllers wouldn’t cut it since they were mostly conversational controllers (pre-1999).
We saw a Fanuc Robodrill in really great shape which also had a Fanuc control, but was priced pretty high. The Fanuc control will do circular interpolation in addition to both conversational and G-code.
There are also the early to late 80’s vintage machines like the Matsuura 500V and Kitamura MyCenter 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.. which are the predecessors to the fully-enclosed machine centers of the early nineties.
Then you get into the fully-enclosed models that are the mainstays of many job shops.
Of course, making life more interesting is the option of getting a CNC bed mill (not the knee mills, rather, the ones with a solid base and only a moving Z-axis head). One of the most common forms of this is the Southwestern Industries’ Trak Model TRM CNC Bed Mill. It’s a pretty sweet machine that’s more rigid than the “Bridgeport” knee mills. Having a 40-taper spindle is also great for those faster tool changes.
We’ll keep you updated as things progress. There are still a lot of articles yet to be published, but we thought that a little update was in order.
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.