[caleb0789]

I am considering trying to get into machining ductile iron parts that we currently powder coat for a casting facility. Anything I should know or understand in general when considering the machines capability with this material? Throughput? (Orders can range from 4k drill holes in small pins to 3k fist sized hood latches that have small machined surfaces)

Any insight is helpful thank you!

[Jim Dawson]

The TM-2P will work fine for what you describe. We machine everything from plastic to stainless steel with ours.

Just set up a fixture plate so you can put as many parts on the table as possible. We bolted a table sized, 1'' thick MIC6 aluminum plate to ours, and use it as a pallet holder with interchangeable pallets. We make the pallets out of 39'' x 14'' x 0.5 aluminum. I can provide pictures and details if you like.

Here is one example of some aluminum parts

[caleb0789]

The TM-2P will work fine for what you describe. We machine everything from plastic to stainless steel with ours.

Just set up a fixture plate so you can put as many parts on the table as possible. We bolted a table sized, 1'' thick MIC6 aluminum plate to ours, and use it as a pallet holder with interchangeable pallets. We make the pallets out of 39'' x 14'' x 0.5 aluminum. I can provide pictures and details if you like.

Here is one example of some aluminum parts

That is actually very helpful thank you, you seem rather experienced... would you have any links or reading material to help bring me up to basics especially with financial costing per piece price? I don't think any material is used so is it just machine and tool depreciation as well as lubricant?

[Jim Dawson]

I can't really offer much in the way of reading or links. There are so many variables that it is impossible to try to pin down a cost per part until you can sit down with the part and machine the whole job in your head, fixturing and order of operation is about 80% of the job. And I should say that you will be wrong the first time, and will figure out a better way to do it once you see a part run. I would start with a single part fixture to work out the process, then expand that to the full table. The good news is that in your case, you have lots of parts to run, so there will be room for process improvement.

As far as cost, you are correct. Machine deprecation, maintenance, tooling, and coolant are all costs that need to be figured in. But don't forget about the work holding, fixtures cost money to design and build, but you most likely only need to do that once. That is just part of the job cost. Then there is the time spent on the CAM work to create the G code to run the job.

In our case, we manufacture parts for our own product, so we own the designs and can make changes for ease of manufacturing. A couple months ago we did a major design review and made a number of design changes to streamline our manufacturing process, eliminating a number of secondary operations. You won't have that luxury when working with customer parts, however it may be possible to submit design change requests to facilitate your process, once you figure out what the process actually is.

You might want to look at Titans of CNC YouTube videos to get some idea of what is involved. https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...=titans+of+cnc