[Bodaddy]

Hi guys this is my first post so excuse me if I'm in the wrong place, I wanted as many opinions as possible.
We have a 2 spindle lathe with live tooling & I was wondering how much time if any, every one spends warming up their live tooling after a long weekend? As I am running 6 in my turret now I don't want to spend a ton of time.. They are all Von Ruden, external coolant. Except for a WTO 2:1 HOB.
Thanks

[fizzissist]

Interesting question. To be honest, I never warmed my live spindles up, only the main.
In retrospect, I'm almost embarrassed I never even gave it a thought. Probably since they seldom ran full on 4000rpm or full load.

Wouldn't be hard to write a warmup program that cycled the turret to do that while the main was warming up... and I ALWAYS warmed up the main and X-Z axis.

[txcncman]

All things being equal, there is no actual "warm up". The point of a "warm up" cycle is to disperse lubricant. If your live tools are lubricated with grease, there is no need to run a "warm up" cycle. If lubricated with oil, a very few revolutions is all that is needed.

[Bodaddy]

Thanks for the replies!
We currently have not warmed them up. However until recently we we only doing low speed milling & drilling.
As of late we have some new inserted cutters & carbide drills that I can really crank up! So I got to wondering what every one else does?

[The Blight]

The lathe I'm working on states in the manual that it needs a warm up cycle for the live tooling if it has been sitting still for a long period of time.

Does it perhaps say anything about it in the manual for your machine?

If you need to warm it up a bit (Disperse lubrication), then write a short problem and run it while you grab a cup of coffee :-)

[Bodaddy]

I sometimes manually rotate the spindle with the jog button for a lil bit. But i haven't written a program for it. Just the main & sub right now.

[txcncman]

Put some code into your warm up program to rotate the turret to each tool position and turn the live tool on for about 20 seconds each. Hide these blocks of code behind block delete (/) and run only when wanted.

[Bodaddy]

Good point. Thanks, I will prob do that with the sub spindle as we don't run it very often.

[neilw20]

In my SX3 I was doing a lot of high speed (well for SX3 @ 3600RPM) milling with end mill.
I initially ran it for 45-60 minutes as the spindle expanded in Z as it warmed.
I eventually found a sweet spot at 10 minutes, where the spindle expansion matched the cutter wear rate( about 40 microns in 35 minutes)
Machine was holding 2.5microns with many added tweaks.
About 11000 machining cycles of 2 minutes each on stainless.
10mm 3FL cutter life 35 minutes. 33 of them to resharpen at a time.
Precision Z control video by neilw20_2008 | Photobucket
Video for the non believers.
All the gibs were reground every 100 hours.
Yes warming up can have an optimum time.