I was wondering if anyone has set up a RapidTurn with gang tooling mounted on the mill table. I have seen the Youtube videos by Threadexpress where he does gang tooling mounted from the mill spindle and looks like he has done a very good job, but I was thinking of mounting the Rapidturn off of the mill table either to the side or back of the table and then putting the gang tooling on the table. My reasoning for this is that I think it would be much easier to convert from mill to lathe and back than having to remove the vise, mount the RapidTurn on the table, mount up the tools on the spindle, etc. I am thinking that if the Rapidturn is mounted on the far back side or left side of the machine base it can be left in place, or at least easily put on and off and then the gang tooling can be mounted on the usually unused end of the table easily or possibly left in place a lot of the time. Basically this would be like a slant bed lathe using the mill table as the bed. You would not be able to use the index features of the Slantpro with the mill spindle like this, but you could put live tooling on the table like you could with a slant bed, although you would only be able to move the tooling in two axis.
How do you plan to ensure that the RapidTurn is in a fixed position in relation to the mill? Some sort of plate under the whole mill base with a riser on which to mount the RaptidTurn at approximately table height?
Unless I misunderstand your plan the RapidTurn axis would be rotated 90-degrees from its usual orientation. I believe that this would cause serious problems with the PP conversational turning features.
I just got the machine Saturday so I have not had a good chance to take a good look and figure out the best way to mount it yet. I was figuring that the sheet metal base was probably not going to be rigid enough. Perhaps with some square tubing welded in the right spots or some heavy duty plate that sandwiches between the mill and the base? That is why I was asking if anyone else had considered or done something similar that has already worked some of this out.
As far as mounting the Rapidturn 90 degrees to its usual axis, that is one of two options I am considering. The second option would be to mount it in its normal axis, but off the far left side of the table with the gang tooling mounted on the table. In that configuration the axis will be backwards since you are moving the tools, not the table. Either way, some rearranging of things in software would be required. I have not installed PathPilot so not sure how difficult that would be. Sure that would be one of several challenges.
I neglected to mention that with table mounted tooling it can only be moved in X/Y (not stacked inm Z) so there would be significant limits due to tooling fouling with the workpiece and/or chuck. It seems to me that the limit might be a turning, a facing and perhaps a couple of boring tools for most workpieces although it might work very well for some jobs.
The movement on the 1100 is 18" X 9.5". The movement on the Tormach SlantPro is 10" X 12". Depending on how things were set up I think that would give me more than enough motion and still allow enough tools. I generally don't turn very big parts anyway and the Rapidturn is not really made for big parts.
gang tooling on RapidTurn
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