Spent 45 minutes chasing a .005 inch offset on a Haas VF-2 yesterday

I was running a batch of 6061 parts and the finish pass came out looking like garbage. Turns out the coolant nozzle was aimed wrong and chips were recutting under the insert. Swapped to a high pressure nozzle and turned the feed down from 40 to 32 ipm and it cleaned right up. Anyone else ever get blindsided by something as dumb as chip evacuation?

2 comments

2 Comments

tyler36827d ago

Buddy of mine spent two hours changing tools and offsets on a VMC before he realized his roughing pass had a .002 bump in the Z from a worn drawbar.

derek_burns27d ago

Hold on, you swapped nozzles and dropped feed by 8 ipm and that fixed it? That's wild. I've had chips recut before but it usually showed up as weird surface finish not a straight up garbage pass. @tyler368 your buddy's drawbar story is giving me flashbacks. I had a VF-3 once that had a .001 taper in the spindle bore and it took me a week to figure out why every face mill cut looked like it was done with a butter knife. Chip evac is one of those things you think you've got dialed until you don't. Thirty two ipm on 6061 though, that's actually pretty aggressive for a finish pass on a Haas. What tool were you running?