[cosmoman]

Recieved new position at my employer. I am taking over programming several citizen machines. Swiss machining is totally new to me so I am learning set up. But at the same time I am learning solidworks as well as partmaker. just looking for advice on how to juggle learning all three at one time.

[DCogswell]

Recieved new position at my employer. I am taking over programming several citizen machines. Swiss machining is totally new to me so I am learning set up. But at the same time I am learning solidworks as well as partmaker. just looking for advice on how to juggle learning all three at one time.

Learning how to become a swiss-type machinist will depend on your current experience, willingness to learn something new, how well you learn and how many opportunities you'll have to program/set-up.

[cosmoman]

I served a 10000 hour apprenticeship and received tool and die papers. Then went on to teach myself microscopic welding. Started my own welding service. Took on a partner and have trained them to become a quite proficient microwelder. I still have ownership in welding business. but due to unforeseen circumstances had to acquire affordable health insurance. My welding companies site is microfusionwelding.com. I always put a 110 percent into anything which highly interests me and cnc Swiss does as well as microwelding.

[SirDenisNayland]

Chill out on Solidworks and focus on the other two aspects. I cannot stress learning what each function does and how the machines work in general with each other. Unless you have the same model citizens you're in for a good challange as in my personal experienece they're all a little different. I've got three different sets of interfernece disable codes for three different citizens for instance.

Make sure you understand the code. It's one thing to read through a program and comprehend it, its another thing to actually understand it and the order of process operations to the point you could write it yourself.

I've got a new guy who is out of school and they did everything with MasterCAM. I told him to make me a simple tapping program and he told me he couldn't. I rhetorically asked "but I thought you understood the code?" At this point he had been running a few machines and "studied" the code. He told me he understood it if he was reading the program, so I said "well then you don't really understand it" we argued a little and I smiled and taught him how to dial in a part.

Moral is, you've got a definite challenge and hurdles ahead of you, but you sound like you have a good head on your shoulders, and to be quite frank not everyone gets thrown into such a position so someone must have seen great promise in you. All you can do is your best.

[txcncman]

Spend at least 80 hours per week on the job and in about 3 months you will know it all.

[WillRitter]

Hi Cosmoman,
I'm in the same position as you, except I own the company and gave myself the new job : ). I am making parts for our own products, a long 1/4" pin (using both spindles and live tooling) and some bushings. It took me a long time to get to know the machine, this site and the members have been a great resource. I am writing our code by hand as the parts are pretty simple and we are not a job shop, $8K for partmaker doesn't pencil out. You may want to write some code by hand to get to know all of the features of your machine, I did that with my first CNC mill back in the day and found it very helpful. I had zero cnc lathe experience before getting started with the Citizen, but did get a few helpful pointers from a friend of mine that does lots of lathe work and a swiss machinist that lives about an hour away.

I have a 1994 Citizen L-20. When I was machine shopping I took this course so I'd have half a clue on what I was looking at: Mastering CNC Swiss. I really liked the course, and the online format makes it easy to move through the material. In my book it was $800 well spent. Montana also offers some worker retraining grants, your state may do the same so they would foot part of the bill.

I sent prints of the parts I am making to GenSwiss before I bought the machine and they created a list of tooling for me which I purchased before I had the machine up and running. I would not recommend doing this. The tooling I bought was all pretty expensive, and the inserts were really brittle (I am turning lots of stainless which is not very forgiving). I'm now using different tooling that I'm buying from MSC. The Nickole cutoff holder is about half the price of the Utilis one I bought from GenSwiss, and the inserts are about 2/3 the price. Most importantly the inserts are actually designed correctly so they don't break at the screw hole like the Utilis ones (never got to use the other cutting edge!), so they are more like 1/3 the price. MSC also ships overnight for $11 and gets to our shop by 10:30 am.

Good luck and feel free to PM me for another noob's perspective.

[SwissType1]

@ Will Ritter

I am sorry you had trouble with the UTILIS products. I don't see any open history here that I can refer to see what it is you were working on. If you want to give me a call I'd be happy to discuss your application with you. Additionally, I hope you genuinely tried to remedy the situation with us before deciding to speak poorly in a public forum. Product support and assistance as well as marketing honesty is something that we take pride in.

UTILIS tools are being widely used by tier one medical manufacturers with extreme success. Yes, they're expensive, but they deliver the performance when applied properly just like any other high end Swiss-made tooling line. If they were not top-shelf products I would not be here defending them.

If you wish, you can speak with our in-house Swiss guru. He turns 17-4PH H900 all day exclusively with UTILIS tools in our shop with some astounding results. I think your problems may have stemmed from a speeds/feeds issue.

I am glad you found something that you like working with and that suits your needs though. Welcome to Swiss-type machining.

@Cosmoman, where are you located? I've seen several excellent CNC Swiss training classes offered around the states being taught by some of the best in the business. Maybe you could get in on one of those. I attended one myself and it got a lot out of it.

Scott@GenSwiss