Originally Posted by
SirDenisNayland
Slow and low is the way to go. When the bar is changing every hour and you're running 24/7 its quite inefficient to manually load bars, especially if you run lights out and don't have capable night operators to be trusted to do such a thing.
Perhaps you're talking about even smaller diameters, but Ive run 3/16 brass and 303,304,416 stainless with a 12mm left hand cutoff without any issues.
Extended nose collets cost an arm and a leg and take quite a while to deliver, arent as accurate, and dont evenly clamp the part which produces a push on the part on pick off. I ordered up one collet I absolutely needed for a job that required a lot of mill work on a K16 and I needed the length simply because I had to support the part while milling and if I didnt have the EN I would have run the machine into itself. The collet took over a month to get to me after their quoted "2 weeks" Boss was not happy, and he had given me substantial lead time.
If you have to get the job up, you gotta do what you gotta do. Thats the biggest folly in machining if you ask me. Everyone only thinks of ideal situations which is more often than not not possible and you have to learn to work with what you have
Cheers