My name is Jim and first I would like to thank Titan for all of his hard work creating the Academy and going well beyond the call to do his part to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.A.
I’ve been making chips for about the last 50 years, much of it as manufacturing support, tool & die, and maintenance. I also have a good background in industrial controls engineering and motion control systems. I acquired my first CNC machine about 8 years ago at the insistence of my son. Prior to that I couldn’t even spell CNC. A 2 axis Bridgeport clone knee mill with an antique Anilam controller. It didn’t take too long before I upgraded it to a 4 axis machine with modern controls, and it still serves us well today.
I was really trying to retire (i’m 70 now) and just putter around in the shop, but my son retired from AutoDesk where he directed several of the teams of software developers that created Fusion 360 for us. Obviously we are using Fusion 360 for our design and CAM needs. One of the reasons I signed up for the CNC Academy is because I still struggle trying to create designs in Fusion 360 so step by step instructions will be a big help. I’m an expert in 2D AutoCAD, but this poor old brain is having trouble working in 3D solid models.
After retiring from AutoDesk, my son decided to embark on a new adventure and developed a truck camper accessory product that has a lot of machined parts. It turned out that the product was a hit and we found out quickly that a knee mill and a manual toolroom lathe was not going to be adequate meet our production needs. 40 minutes to machine one particular part on the manual lathe was a non-starter. We had similar problems producing the milled parts. With limited HP, the spindle just wasn’t fast enough, nor was it built to take extended high speeds.
We talked to some local CNC shops and got quotes for our parts, they came back with some ridiculously high quotes. One part in particular was quoted at about $50 each and there are 8 of those required for one unit. It seems that the shops did not understand the concept of high speed machining.
Just those 8 parts would have cost almost our target retail price for one unit. Obviously that was not going to work, so time to get our own production machines. We are now machining those parts at about $4.00 each, including material, using a $150/hr shop time rate.
So our first, new to us, machine was a 30 year old, but mechanically near new, Hardinge Conquest 42 CNC lathe w/live tooling, with a Fanuc control. We cut that 40 minute manual lathe part down to just under 4 minutes on the Hardinge. But we still had the mill problem. We found an almost new (122 spindle hours) 2016 Haas TM-2P, that had every accessory option that Haas offered, including a 20 tool changer. We chose the TM-2P because of the limited single phase power we have available.
Once we caught up a bit on production we upgraded the antique controls on the Hardinge to a modern control system, and can use the Haas turn post from Fusion 360. She’s a good old girl, and holds +/- 0.0002 all day long.
We developed a quick change pallet system for the TM-2P and with parts designed for production, and the abilities of the Haas, we cut the machining time by about a factor of 6 over the knee mill.
We use the Titan philosophy of high speed machining: Find the absolute limit of the machine and tooling, then back it down a little bit and crank out parts. BOOM !
In the near future we will host an Academy Small Group in the Portland, Oregon area and hopefully be able to further Titan’s vision of Made in America.