Shop Old school stuff

[little ol' e]

The index style button insert that relied on the pin was a European thing forced on the North American market, it was not conducive to business in the Mould and Die industry. IIRC that was a late development though, 2006? I strongly objected but was overruled. However it was well accepted in the turbine industry milling heat resistant materials.
I made excellent bonus dollars flogging the High feed cutters, nearly unbeatable in P20, and certainly in titanium , stainless , Inconel. We had some tremendous successes in Aerospace world wide up until I left unwillingly in 2013. I think that program was a main factor in Kennametal buying us out
I recall many protests over the button cutters, I’m sure I was involved with your shop over it at some point, I had no defense of it and could only agree, I was never one to push something I didn’t believe in.

My memory isn't the greatest these days but, IIRC, I was dealing with Guy and the sales team, along with the tooling reps for testing @ Duramill in those years. Prior to Duramill getting on board with Kennametal I believe.

Now that I think back, it must have been around the mid way of 2006. I started my business in 2005 in the Derry/Torbram area building progressive, hand/mechanical transfer dies. ( I certainly could have met you, still have several of the speed/feed sliders in a box someplace. do you recall if this your territory at the time? )
If so, I'm sure we went out to lunch, leaf and blue jay games on several occasions, jeez, times were good then, as you mentioned.

IIRC, once the late development happened, they had removed the TIALN edge coating from the insert when the pin index holders came out.
It came at a good time thou, this is when Mitsubishi came along with the high feed mills I believe? The offer was, they exchanged any old indexable holder with a free Mits body if we ordered 20+ inserts per body.
We were crazy not to switch at the time since the mits preformed so well in the feed mill style. They performed exceptionally well with interrupted cuts on A2-D2, and PH 4140.

Your experience will make a nice impact on the forum.
Some members here are making strides into CNC milling.
Cheers,
Eric

 

[Dan Dubeau]

My memory isn't the greatest these days but, IIRC, I was dealing with Guy and the sales team, along with the tooling reps for testing @ Duramill in those years. Prior to Duramill getting on board with Kennametal I believe.

Now that I think back, it must have been around the mid way of 2006. I started my business in 2005 in the Derry/Torbram area building progressive, hand/mechanical transfer dies. ( I certainly could have met you, still have several of the speed/feed sliders in a box someplace. do you recall if this your territory at the time? )
If so, I'm sure we went out to lunch, leaf and blue jay games on several occasions, jeez, times were good then, as you mentioned.

IIRC, once the late development happened, they had removed the TIALN edge coating from the insert when the pin index holders came out.
It came at a good time thou, this is when Mitsubishi came along with the high feed mills I believe? The offer was, they exchanged any old indexable holder with a free Mits body if we ordered 20+ inserts per body.
We were crazy not to switch at the time since the mits preformed so well in the feed mill style. They performed exceptionally well with interrupted cuts on A2-D2, and PH 4140.

Your experience will make a nice impact on the forum.
Some members here are making strides into CNC milling.
Cheers,
Eric

I still have one of those mits ajx cutters with a few inserts left. The free body with 2 boxes of inserts was a great marketing strategy. We use Seco feed mills now. The mits were better imo, but we needed longer stick tools than mits could provide at the time, so we switched and never went back.

 

[little ol' e]

Hey Dan,
For sure, Mits marketing strategy benefited all of us back then. We were all learning, the $$ was flowing, cutter testing was moving in huge strides.
I've been hearing good things from the shops I know running Seco these days. I'm not a fan of them myself and never would have guessed that they would have stepped up in the game.

We needed longer stick tools as well back then,
We went with the modular system for a while, but exited from that deal after a couple years. This was the pokolm line of modular which was taken over from Depo tools if you recall.
Depo-cam was on the seen as well until it had changed to machining strategist.
Wicked software at the time really... very close to Work-nc...so you can imagine how far they got. France, just wasn't wanting or having any of that!
All good stuff, great sales guys, but the stories were kept quiet during the transitional days, things were changing quick haha.

Sounds like your working with decent tooling!

 

[Dan Dubeau]

Hey Dan,
For sure, Mits marketing strategy benefited all of us back then. We were all learning, the $$ was flowing, cutter testing was moving in huge strides.
I've been hearing good things from the shops I know running Seco these days. I'm not a fan of them myself and never would have guessed that they would have stepped up in the game.

We needed longer stick tools as well back then,
We went with the modular system for a while, but exited from that deal after a couple years. This was the pokolm line of modular which was taken over from Depo tools if you recall.
Depo-cam was on the seen as well until it had changed to machining strategist.
Wicked software at the time really... very close to Work-nc...so you can imagine how far they got. France, just wasn't wanting or having any of that!
All good stuff, great sales guys, but the stories were kept quiet during the transitional days, things were changing quick haha.

Sounds like your working with decent tooling!

Machining strategist. THAT is the cam system I couldn't remember the name from the other thread. Only worked with it briefly at a mold shop for a couple weeks before I quit. I'm about 80% sure that's what it was anyway. Specialized towards highspeed milling and had some really crazy 3d high speed lead options that whipped the cutter around as opposed to the more standard retract and plunge style. We were cutting tiny electrodes with tiny tools in telco (As well as hardmilling), on a high speed pallet changing machine and it was pretty cool to work with, even though the version they had was quite a few years outdated at the time. That was back in 2014.

We use Seco primarily because the local rep is a good friend of the Owner. Decent tools, but I don't push any of it nearly hard enough to exploit the differences between them all. We have a few of the combimaster holders and extensions, and they work well enough for what we do. One off stuff, no production, so every job is the same just different.....

 

[little ol' e]

Yep, Initially it was Depo-cam then switched to Machining strategist. All geared to high speed milling, hard milling and very user friendly back then.
They were the first to come out with linking passes for high speed milling, that eliminated the point to point line stepovers into an arc.
Since Mastercam and Work nc were still in the point to point stage and the machines were having a hard time with acc/dec times. This software was way ahead of its time.
They also had silhouette boundary options, that was cool as well. You would remember that for sure .

With Work nc, we were still having to change our look ahead parameters in the old Fanuc 18m controllers in order to run faster feed rates but at the cost of some surface tolerances.
IIRC, I would get into the parameter pages in the controller, change level 1601 to read 40 lines ahead and level 1610 to read them in at 10 milliseconds from 30 pre set in the controller.

It doesn't seem that long ago we were doing all these crazy things, that's until i looked at myself in the mirror today haha.
Good times back then to say the least.

 

[Dan Dubeau]

I remember being pissed off they lied to me about running all up to date software, but once I caught on to it, there was a lot of cool options I'd never seen in any cam system before. Very intuitive to learn. Programming and running that Mikron high speed machine was the only good thing about that job lol. Loading up and programming about 5 pallets of trodes to run overnight and coming into them all sitting there like shiny soldiers in the morning was pretty cool. I really miss that Heidenhain control too.