rigid tapping on Hitachi-Seiki HT-23J Lathe

[jbird68]

We have a Hitachi-Seiki HT23J with a Seicos-J controller. I need a rigid tapping program for a center hole. I am not sure it the lathe has a rigid tapping cycle or not. I don't recall ever using a G-code for rigid tapping. We have the multi-conversational programming but nothing for tapping. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[jorgehrr]

I use G1..Like this:
G97SxxxM3
G0Z approach a least .5 away from part X0
G1 Z-Depth of thread F 1 divided by pitch (some times I decrease feed 20%)
M5
M4
Z.25F your feed plus 20% more

Your RPM will be base in what you cut and...
save yourself some trouble use "floating holder" if possible

It works for me

Jorge

[jbird68]

We have an older Tapmatic Floating Tap Holder that worked great in the past. I guess our last operator didn't like using it and so we ended up hand tapping all holes. I was truing to search through our programs to find a sample of what we used to do. But we have almost 4,000 programs. We use PCFile as our database. That is an old 80's database program. It's limited on searching the first string of a field only. You can't search for words in the middle of the file. I think it's time we changed that. But that is a lot of manual re-typing since you can't export PCFile data to another format. Plus I don't think there is anything in the PCFile database that tells me if there was a tapping operation in a program. I'd have to manually flip through all the set-up books to find a tapping program.

If I racall, I had a tapping program written on a sheet of paper that I had to enter into the program manually. But that paper is not gone and that is why I was asking if anyone had a simple tapping program.

thanks for your help.