My lathe has a 12 station VDI 30 turret which seems to be an old standard with most machines moving to the BMT system which makes me a little worried that I'm married into tooling which is disappearing.

I'm finding that I'm getting piles of use out of the offset face gang tool boring bar holders and less use out of single tool holders because I can save a lot of time toolchanging with smaller parts. The frustrating thing is that I can't find many of them for sale. It seems that single axial tool holders are the norm. I find myself modifying my holders to hold even a third tool. I've even managed to get the turret set up for several different parts to reduce setup time between certain frequently run parts.

Is everyone making big parts that wouldn't clear gang tools?

I'm finding that the gang tools are harder to get perfectly centered in the Y axis. Long boring bars are very sensitive to cutting high or low, but I'd still much rather run them in a gang tool.

Is VDI on the way out?