[Hamzter]

Hi Guys,

Inspired by this video I thought I'd have a go at making a gang tool for my Sieg SX3 mill, took a fair few modifications to the macros and post processor but I finally got it working...

https://youtu.be/aYxYEaLFJyA

I'm still playing with the settings, I think I need to be more aggressive to get the chipbreakers working. The turning tools are held with MiteeBite clamps, the drills and boring bar are held in ER collet blocks (from here) which are set screwed into position. The front and rearmost blocks are ER32, which should be large enough to support TTS toolholders, this should allow me to do toolchanges and have Mach3 automatically read out the Z height from a tool table, but that's a future mod I won't be looking at for a little while.

Software wise I'm using Mach3, I couldn't find a built in way of making toolchanges work (since toolchanges require movement of the Y axis which doesn't usually exist on a lathe), instead I've used G52 to apply an offset to the part zero. With tool 0 selected, zero off a corner of the gang tool, then when a tool change is called it applies an offset written in the M6Start macro.

For the CAM, I'm using Inventor HSM 2016, this required some fudging of the post processor because Mach3 doesn't support some of the turning G codes. The most notable problem was that G83 in Mach3 didn't work properly, it required some rewriting of the M1083 macro.

Still a lot of work to do anyway, you might have noticed there's a boring bar and threading tool which I've not yet worked out, I've got some changes to make to Mach3 aswell, such as reprogramming the Zero buttons to apply zero as if the offset was cancelled (it's currently far too easy to hit Zero with the wrong tool selected, usually resulting in a crash!).

Let me know if anyone's interested in the CAD for the gang tool or macro code and I'll post it up.

[LilHalfSquat]

Nice!! I'm thinking of doing something similar for a part I need t make.