Musings about CNC lathe tooling

[UWP_Wes]

I was pondering today about CNC lathe tooling. I was curious if it would be advantageous to have the tool post mounted on a vertical rotary axis so that the tool could remain normal to the tool path when contouring?

The advantage is that you would not need to switch between left-hand and right-hand tools. Also, you could contour complex shapes in one shot. It could also be used with live tooling.

Disadvantages are increased complexity, cost, and required controls. Tool changes might also be pretty tough (turrets and what not). The controls required might be complex as well (radius/length compensation).

What are your thoughts on this? If there is a lathe that does this I would love to know more about it.

-Wes

[RICHARD ZASTROW]

You might add lack of rigidity to your list of disadvantages. Might work for lighter cuts or on near net forms such as castings etc.

See what happens when you can't sleep? Lots of unusual ideas. LOL

Dick Z

[RotarySMP]

I like the thought behind this.

I guess in practice you don't need this because CNC Lathe normally have ATC's so it doesn't really matter if you need multiple tools to get the job done, and for many jobs a single 35° diamond tool can do 90% of profiling needs.

[UWP_Wes]

I think this Mazak machine might be capable of what I am talking about. It does not seem like it is used in this was though.

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1Fj1j8Sg1g&feature=related"]YouTube- cnc integrex200y[/nomedia]

[MadMax]

Problem is clearing the rotating tool post on both sides. Most tool posts or turrets are pretty long in the Z direction. Rotating the tool to work on the side far from the mainspindle would limit you to working one tool post diameter away from the headstock which could be quite a long way away resulting in high length vs. dia part design.

That Mazak machine is pretty incredible, but it would suffer from a long tool change time having to go back to the tool changer station for each change. That's fine for long cut time parts with fewer tool changes (like that crankshaft), but it'd get it's butt kicked by a much cheaper machine if it were to do simpler (more typical) multi tool parts. Especially considering that that class of machine costs in the $400k plus range.

There are many (probably most) parts that can be more rapidly made with four $100k Y axis/live tool/subspindle machines than a single $400k super machine with a belt changer.

Very exotic machines like that Integrex tend to be specialists.