Mills and Lathes

S

SummitFever

Eats Squid
The Noga arms are great and a pleasure to use. The surface finish on the magnetic base looks a bit agricultural on mine (not that it matters).
 
S

SummitFever

Eats Squid
Just tooling up for a tricky job. Involves some hard material and M4 threads. I am not sure it will be possible to rigid tap and breaking a tap off in the workpiece may well ruin the job so I'll be thread milling (the preferred approach for really hard material as you can take multiple cuts on the way to the finished thread).

I need to write my on custom gcode thread milling subroutines due to the trickiness of the job so the 5 thread milling cutters on the left are relatively inexpensive Chinese cutters for playing around/debugging. The cutter in the middle out of its box is the Guhring M4 thread milling cutter that is worth 2x as much as the 5 Chinese cutters on the left so I want everything properly dialled in before I begin snapping those off. The gold cutter to the right is a 'normal' Guhring thread tap used for rigid tapping (not as expensive as the thread mill but a very hard carbide part to remove if you miscalculate on the speeds and feeds and snap it off in the workpiece).

Fun times.

 
link1896

link1896

Mr Greenfield
Nothing like an expensive tool going TWANG to ruin the day.


Can’t do inserts, say M12 that thread into the hard material, and the inserts have m4 tapped in their centre, tooling risk on larger diameter holes has to be lower.


Prototype or finished product?
 
S

SummitFever

Eats Squid
Finished products. No space for inserts and the bigger machine taps break as easy as the small ones. The holes are also blind so extra risky with rigid tapping and extra painful to remove a broken tap. The thread bores will actually be undercut at the bottom with some very neat little single point cutters that we have ground in-house.

I'll be climb milling the threads from the bottom of the bores up in several passes. Probably just run air for chip evacuation as I'm worried about flood coolant holding the chips in the holes (no through tool coolant options on these size thread mills). The chip size will be very small though, so might be a non-issue. Tool life is also going to be interesting.

All in all, I'm looking forward to giving it a go. Also, once I'm done with these cutters for this job then I expect them to still be plenty good to run some parts in alu. The grooving cutters and thread milling cutters are particularly useful for suspension related stuff for cutting o-ring grooves and milling large diameter fine threads like for fork caps and air cans etc.
 
dazz

dazz

Downhill Dazz
SummitFever said:
Finished products. No space for inserts and the bigger machine taps break as easy as the small ones. The holes are also blind so extra risky with rigid tapping and extra painful to remove a broken tap. The thread bores will actually be undercut at the bottom with some very neat little single point cutters that we have ground in-house.

I'll be climb milling the threads from the bottom of the bores up in several passes. Probably just run air for chip evacuation as I'm worried about flood coolant holding the chips in the holes (no through tool coolant options on these size thread mills). The chip size will be very small though, so might be a non-issue. Tool life is also going to be interesting.

All in all, I'm looking forward to giving it a go. Also, once I'm done with these cutters for this job then I expect them to still be plenty good to run some parts in alu. The grooving cutters and thread milling cutters are particularly useful for suspension related stuff for cutting o-ring grooves and milling large diameter fine threads like for fork caps and air cans etc.
Click to expand...
What hardness are you cutting? We're always looking for new/better ways to cut threads in case hardened EN36. Near 60 in the case and ~45 in the core (HRC). We usually plan ahead and allow some extra material so we can hard turn/mill the case off prior to drilling and threading. Once you get up into the mid to high 50's for hardness the only real safe method we've found is to EDM the threads. Not fast or cheap but pretty much guaranteed to get a good result.
 
S

SummitFever

Eats Squid
Our stock is pre-hardened to somewhere in the 42-46HRC range. We don't have a hardness tester so I can't be 100% sure. EDM would be the way to go, but at <46HRC it is certainly machinable with good tooling and rigid fixturing.

I can't share any production pics but I'll be running a number of test pieces that I can probably photograph.
 
dazz

dazz

Downhill Dazz
SummitFever said:
Our stock is pre-hardened to somewhere in the 42-46HRC range. We don't have a hardness tester so I can't be 100% sure. EDM would be the way to go, but at <46HRC it is certainly machinable with good tooling and rigid fixturing.

I can't share any production pics but I'll be running a number of test pieces that I can probably photograph.
Click to expand...
Yeah, you should be fine thread milling 42-46, that's around the core hardness of our material and our tooling lasts OK unless we get a bit too close to the case on the other side of the part (say at the bottom of a blind mounting hole in a crown wheel for example).
 
dazz

dazz

Downhill Dazz
LOL, just actually looked at our FB page and the first post has replies with pics from a disgruntled customer that's smashed one of our gear sets! Funny how some people think that when you buy aftermarket gears they are made of some mystery material that is indestructible. They smash the OE gears, buy ours that are 'x' stronger, and expect them to last forever. :rolleyes:
 
G

goobags

Likes Dirt
dazz said:
LOL, just actually looked at our FB page and the first post has replies with pics from a disgruntled customer that's smashed one of our gear sets! Funny how some people think that when you buy aftermarket gears they are made of some mystery material that is indestructible. They smash the OE gears, buy ours that are 'x' stronger, and expect them to last forever. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
A mate has a PPG sequential box and the fairly high powered GTR it’s in has been off the road for over 12 months waiting on parts. Ate 3rd gear and on rebuilding found the input shaft with cracks in it. I’m sure he wishes he bought something with locally manufactured parts


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
ozzybmx

ozzybmx

taking a shit with my boobs out
goobags said:
A mate has a PPG sequential box and the fairly high powered GTR it’s in has been off the road for over 12 months waiting on parts.
Click to expand...
Vid prices, those GTR's are worth a mint at the moment.

My mate was sold a GTR-R34 in purple by a mate of his who needed the cash to go to Thailand and has disappeared and not contacted anyone in 2yrs.
 
Miguel75

Miguel75

Likes Dirt
I watched the lathe rebuild clip someone posted earlier after thinking “it’s only one clip: how much time can it take?”

Now I find myself dabbling in all sorts of restoration clips; thinking of reasons to buy tools I don’t know how to use, to spend time I don’t have in order to “fix” things I wont know what to do with.
 
K

komdotkom

Likes Bikes and Dirt
ozzybmx said:
Vid prices, those GTR's are worth a mint at the moment.

My mate was sold a GTR-R34 in purple by a mate of his who needed the cash to go to Thailand and has disappeared and not contacted anyone in 2yrs.
Click to expand...

Tell me about it! I'm thinking about cutting the roll cage out of mine and selling it as a road car.
I remember passing on a 34GTR in the late 2000's for $35k because it was a bit rough and I wanted a blue one...
Isn't the PPG stuff made in Adelaide? My mate runs one in his Evo and parts (dogs not gears) are not too hard to get.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top