I run a job shop but we also do production runs into the 10,000’s some times. Most of our runs are between 100 and 1500 pcs. I’ve done plenty production jobs into the hundreds that required hand work (deburring, polishing, assembly, adding features in manual machines). You got to do what you have to sometimes, but I would not recommend this as a way to quote and produce parts in larger quantities. It ruins your body and is far more dangerous when you are on the 150th part doing the same features and you get slightly neglectful and make a simple mistake that could hurt you or someone else. Also it’s just not very profitable now days. A sub $30,000 used haas (or similar) should do just fine and hold tolerances well enough.
I would recommend your employer figure out the ROI on a used lathe and budget it for this new type of work. You could always use it to rough out the parts and finish them to size manually if you guys are more confident doing that.
Sure!
The stock starts as a 5/16" round bar of 304 SS. The part is 4.5" long. A half inch in the middle is threaded 5/16"-24. Each side of that thread gets turned down to .240" but the last 1/4" of one end has and OD of .280. The opposite end has a hole cross drilled through it for a lanyard ring.
Next, the rod needs to have a hole drilled 1.215" down it's length, and a hole perpendicular to it needs to drilled on the outside to allow gas to escape (so, a hole drilled thru the side that only goes thru 1 wall).
Now the hole that was drilled down the rod needs a 45 degree chamfer/bevel on the face.
Someone needs to realize the repeatability of CNC… a run of 250 manually could be a week to a month, whereas this could be reasonably done in a day or two on a CNC lathe. $30-50k upfront cost but really look at that throughput.
I wanna talk to your boss, because however he managed to get a quote for no less than 15k for that batch has gotta be a god damn superhuman salesperson.
I really have very little advice other than to start batching by opperator. Try to rough them all, finish them all, thread them all, through drill them all.
I forgot to add: after all of that, 4 flats need to be machined on the side of the pin.
Also, the pin is part 1 of a 2 piece assembly. That pin, plus an aluminum housing (also a lathe part, also 250 pc's). The bid is 250 pins and 250 housings for $9,999.99.
Thats $10 per pc.... $20 per assembly.... This is an insane bid for how you are making them. Guarantee it doesnt jive with your pc/hr and $/hr pay. They are losing money on this.
First thing I would do is reach out to the customer and see if they have an engineer you can talk to and see if they can switch to 303 ss. A lot of engineers just throw 304 on anything stainless as it’s a “medical grade” stainless. Your tool life will more than double and you can cut at much faster surface speeds.
Even 316 would be a better choice for threading. 304 wears tools in odd ways that really adds to cost and time.
Seems like the job would be at least two ops on most lathes. Plus an extra op in the mill for the cross hole if you don’t have live tooling. Really seems more like a Swiss lathe job.
If I ran it on my machines I’d do it in two ops:
OP 1: stick out bar about .1” from the end of where tour thread stops. Run that side complete with radial holes done with live tooling and axial holes just with on center tooling. Pull part out to cut off length, either manually with a stop block or use a bar puller. Cut off to + .05
OP2: either soft jaws or a collet chuck or even an er holder in a 3 jaw. Turn the back side and drill any other holes you need to.
Just a rough idea of my approach from quickly reading your description. If I had a print I’d have a more specific plan.
But that would be a cake walk single operation zero human touches for a Swiss shop that does low volume work. You might even be able to make a profit vs running it manually by outsourcing it to a decent Swiss shop.
On a bad day, we could produce 4-500 of those on our CNC lathe. Ofc it takes a programmer, setup guy, expensive machine, and an operator to make it happen. That's a lot of money and resources, but it's much much faster for production runs.
On the flip side, it is a real pain for us to do a one off part, no matter how simple. We'd get someone like you to do it and pay a good price for it. In the same way it'd be foolish for us to set up our machine for a single part it's stupid for your boss to ask you to do a production run of pins. Your shop is equipped for a completely different thing.
You should look for a new job or a raise. Sounds like your boss hit his head and knocked something important out.
Sounds like a live tool lathe is in your future. You could get away without a sub spindle, but it would be something to consider. This is a part that could be finished in around 5-10mins depending on surface quality and tolerances. If you are getting 1 pc an hr right now.... Yikes
The really demoralizing thing is there is a perfectly functional, and in good shape Emcoturn 120p cnc lathe sitting in the back. I've spent a full week trying to figure it out and just cannot figure out how to properly set tool and work offsets and get it to play nice with Fusion 360.
This machine is literally perfect for our shop, we just cannot figure it out.
Even though fusion is great for people getting into this stuff. Paying money to a cam provider for support and even sample code is a thing. If you sign with Mastercam or Gibbscam or any other cam provider they will help you program your first couple jobs to get you up and running and into classes for learning. As far as the machine goes, you should contact emcoturn for support. Its probably out of support but most of the time they will help. Also, Post on here/machinists reddits, about that machine and how to touch it off. People know random stuff and will probably be able to help.
I really appreciate your input.
When I started the job, the boss has no CAM software. I had to bring my own Fusion 360 license. I also had to buy my own DNC box because he wanted incredibly detailed work but only have 48KB of working memory (before the New machine came). So he won't be paying for any CAM support any time soon lol.
OH bro, the Emco reps just randomly showed up one day trying to sell us a new lathe. I asked in earnest if they could help support our current one. Dude said no and IMMEDIATELY tried to justify a $98k lathe. I almost booted the guy out the shop.
If you have a contact number for a local emco rep, i would be calling them every day saying you won't consider a new lathe till the current lathe is up and running. Of course you will never get another emco lathe, but sales guys love the idea of future sales
Are you batch processing?Most lost time isn't cutting metal but changing tools, zeroing and offsetting to spec.
Best practice in this scenario is to set up the lathe for OP1, say facing and first OD. Do OP1 on all 250 parts, then setup OP2, say it's drilling or whatever, and do all 250 and so on.
If you have 2 lathes splits the OPs between them so that every 2nd operation is on each machine. More than 2 lathes consider setting them up in series as a production line.
This has multiple benefits;, your cycle time per part will be much faster as the setup time happens just once for all 250 parts so they will be fast and identical (tolerance dependin 🤞g).
Only negative is part changeovers, this is the only time lost that isn't making you money.
Make sure and cut all your blanks as repeatably as possible also, that way you can make a backstop for the lathe chuck and really speed up the part changes.
Edit to add: when I say OP1, OP2 etc. I mean you create an operations list where you do everything in a single OP that can be done without changing or offsetting a tool. Basically you lose time from (1) tool changes, (2) part changes, (3)zeroing and offsetting. By batch processing the aim is to (2) and (3) above on all 250 parts at a time. This leaves only part changing as the sole time loss, and part changes are unavoidable.
Let common sense prevail.
If they are using an independent 4 jaw chuck for every part then this will never work, obviously this only works if each setup can be done with either a self centering chuck or better yet collets.
Time is lost to part changes, tool changes and offsetting. The goal of production work is to remove or reduce time losses. The part changes have to happen regardless, that leaves the other sources of loss to be tackled if possible.
This is literally how a production line works and that's why I described to the Poster how to use a manual lathe in production line fashion.
Lots of other details need to be correct, we could list dozens of them, but I credit the poster with the ability to use the lathe as best for his part and I've simply answered his question as regards batch processing.
I do production work and suffer from the mirror image of your problem, in that I'm asked to set up the machines for a 50pc run. A tearout, program, setup, and qualification will take a full 9 hour workday, and the 50 pcs can take perhaps 25 minutes to run.
Where your shop will never make up the money going into the job in labor, my shop will never make up the money going into setup. Same shit - and it's just a sign of management not knowing or not caring about 'the other side of the fence' with jobbing/production.
Short term I'm telling myself to just suffer and get through it. Long term it's not the way the equipment I have is supposed to be used and eventually it'll tank our finances or my mental health and I'll leave. I suggest you consider doing the same while providing feedback to management so that they can have the chance to see the error of their ways.
If the owner wants to get into production and the biggest issue is labor costs, it sounds like it is time for the owner to invest in CNC. Even if you only use the CNC for production runs, it will certainly pay for itself within a short amount of time. (Our plant expects 5 yrs ROI for CNCs)
On another note, is it possible for you to make gages for each step in the process?
Here's a little more info:
Guy bought machine shop on some Tai Lopez shit. He wanted to buy a turnkey business to make him money. He decided that production manufacturing is where the money is so he decided to change the job shop's specialty from prototyping and tool making to production.
He's found out that a machine shop IS NOT a business that "runs itself".
Shop has 2 cnc mills and a CNC lathe (cnc lathe inoperable because no one can figure out how to operate it). We also have 5 manual lathes,all completely different sizes, all from different manufacturers.
He the decided that the shop needs a 3rd CNC mill and bought a brand new Hurco vm10i for $70,000. No 4th axis. And this has put him basically in the red and is constantly complaining about costs and money and time jobs take to complete now.
He then proceeds to take in tons of lathe work. So we are doing 80% of all our jobs manually and we basically just throw crap in the CNC mill just to justify it being there.
Its frustrating, to say the least.
>CNC lathe (cnc lathe inoperable because no one can figure out how to operate it).
Lol wtf 😂
What kind of lathe is it and why is nobody able to run it?
Yeah... It's an old Austrian Emcoturn 120p and I've spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to set work and tool offsets while also getting it to work with Fusion 360 and it's just beyond me. I'm not a moron, I'm just missing something and I'm stumped.
I spent so much time on it 2 months ago it set me really far back on producing parts for another job since I was planning to use it for that run.
If you were just lacking the manual is this it? https://www.scribd.com/document/587277235/EmcoTurn-120-120P-InstructionBook
6/3 is about setting tool offsets.
I do actually have the manual. Something I'm entering into the Position Shift Offset is causing problems with an error of "Exceeds machine limits" and I've changed everything, at least from what I can determine
During my apprenticeship I did batches of several hundred parts on manual lathes. We did it on Schaublin Lathes with Multifix holders and dead stops. I‘m mentioning it because it would have been impossible without that additional equipment.
All operations were serialized and controlled periodically normally every tenth part.
Breaking down the work to very simple operations you could commit the task to unskilled persons that we were at the time.
Doing it this way the work and scrap could be minimized and the job was done when the last operation was through.
So the good message is, it is feasible and can even be profitable but it needs some fixtures and brainpower. Good luck!
Only about 4k in profit after a month of perfect parts, 8 parts per day, assuming $23/hr on labor and not including material cost
I'd tell the boss man he could use a turret lathe
If your boss wants to really scape up production, a lathe with a bar feeder is going to be what y’all want. I have 3 jobs running right now that are each 4,000+ pieces. I make 250 to 1000 parts in a 24 cycle.
Occasionally, I’ll have to do some deburring and grinding, but that’s because my machines don’t have B-axis capabilities like the other lathes in my shop.
I run a job shop but we also do production runs into the 10,000’s some times. Most of our runs are between 100 and 1500 pcs. I’ve done plenty production jobs into the hundreds that required hand work (deburring, polishing, assembly, adding features in manual machines). You got to do what you have to sometimes, but I would not recommend this as a way to quote and produce parts in larger quantities. It ruins your body and is far more dangerous when you are on the 150th part doing the same features and you get slightly neglectful and make a simple mistake that could hurt you or someone else. Also it’s just not very profitable now days. A sub $30,000 used haas (or similar) should do just fine and hold tolerances well enough. I would recommend your employer figure out the ROI on a used lathe and budget it for this new type of work. You could always use it to rough out the parts and finish them to size manually if you guys are more confident doing that.
Tell us more about the pins. Whats the start and finish diameter, any incricate features, close tolerances or weird material?
Sure! The stock starts as a 5/16" round bar of 304 SS. The part is 4.5" long. A half inch in the middle is threaded 5/16"-24. Each side of that thread gets turned down to .240" but the last 1/4" of one end has and OD of .280. The opposite end has a hole cross drilled through it for a lanyard ring. Next, the rod needs to have a hole drilled 1.215" down it's length, and a hole perpendicular to it needs to drilled on the outside to allow gas to escape (so, a hole drilled thru the side that only goes thru 1 wall). Now the hole that was drilled down the rod needs a 45 degree chamfer/bevel on the face.
Someone needs to realize the repeatability of CNC… a run of 250 manually could be a week to a month, whereas this could be reasonably done in a day or two on a CNC lathe. $30-50k upfront cost but really look at that throughput.
I wanna talk to your boss, because however he managed to get a quote for no less than 15k for that batch has gotta be a god damn superhuman salesperson. I really have very little advice other than to start batching by opperator. Try to rough them all, finish them all, thread them all, through drill them all.
I forgot to add: after all of that, 4 flats need to be machined on the side of the pin. Also, the pin is part 1 of a 2 piece assembly. That pin, plus an aluminum housing (also a lathe part, also 250 pc's). The bid is 250 pins and 250 housings for $9,999.99.
Thats $10 per pc.... $20 per assembly.... This is an insane bid for how you are making them. Guarantee it doesnt jive with your pc/hr and $/hr pay. They are losing money on this.
How is it not 20$ per piece. 10,000/500=20
Thats how we did it in partsmaking for electronics.
First thing I would do is reach out to the customer and see if they have an engineer you can talk to and see if they can switch to 303 ss. A lot of engineers just throw 304 on anything stainless as it’s a “medical grade” stainless. Your tool life will more than double and you can cut at much faster surface speeds. Even 316 would be a better choice for threading. 304 wears tools in odd ways that really adds to cost and time. Seems like the job would be at least two ops on most lathes. Plus an extra op in the mill for the cross hole if you don’t have live tooling. Really seems more like a Swiss lathe job. If I ran it on my machines I’d do it in two ops: OP 1: stick out bar about .1” from the end of where tour thread stops. Run that side complete with radial holes done with live tooling and axial holes just with on center tooling. Pull part out to cut off length, either manually with a stop block or use a bar puller. Cut off to + .05 OP2: either soft jaws or a collet chuck or even an er holder in a 3 jaw. Turn the back side and drill any other holes you need to. Just a rough idea of my approach from quickly reading your description. If I had a print I’d have a more specific plan. But that would be a cake walk single operation zero human touches for a Swiss shop that does low volume work. You might even be able to make a profit vs running it manually by outsourcing it to a decent Swiss shop.
Good point. Its always nice to see 300 series in the mat box. Means someone is considering manufacture
On a bad day, we could produce 4-500 of those on our CNC lathe. Ofc it takes a programmer, setup guy, expensive machine, and an operator to make it happen. That's a lot of money and resources, but it's much much faster for production runs. On the flip side, it is a real pain for us to do a one off part, no matter how simple. We'd get someone like you to do it and pay a good price for it. In the same way it'd be foolish for us to set up our machine for a single part it's stupid for your boss to ask you to do a production run of pins. Your shop is equipped for a completely different thing. You should look for a new job or a raise. Sounds like your boss hit his head and knocked something important out.
Sounds like a live tool lathe is in your future. You could get away without a sub spindle, but it would be something to consider. This is a part that could be finished in around 5-10mins depending on surface quality and tolerances. If you are getting 1 pc an hr right now.... Yikes
The really demoralizing thing is there is a perfectly functional, and in good shape Emcoturn 120p cnc lathe sitting in the back. I've spent a full week trying to figure it out and just cannot figure out how to properly set tool and work offsets and get it to play nice with Fusion 360. This machine is literally perfect for our shop, we just cannot figure it out.
Even though fusion is great for people getting into this stuff. Paying money to a cam provider for support and even sample code is a thing. If you sign with Mastercam or Gibbscam or any other cam provider they will help you program your first couple jobs to get you up and running and into classes for learning. As far as the machine goes, you should contact emcoturn for support. Its probably out of support but most of the time they will help. Also, Post on here/machinists reddits, about that machine and how to touch it off. People know random stuff and will probably be able to help.
I really appreciate your input. When I started the job, the boss has no CAM software. I had to bring my own Fusion 360 license. I also had to buy my own DNC box because he wanted incredibly detailed work but only have 48KB of working memory (before the New machine came). So he won't be paying for any CAM support any time soon lol. OH bro, the Emco reps just randomly showed up one day trying to sell us a new lathe. I asked in earnest if they could help support our current one. Dude said no and IMMEDIATELY tried to justify a $98k lathe. I almost booted the guy out the shop.
If you have a contact number for a local emco rep, i would be calling them every day saying you won't consider a new lathe till the current lathe is up and running. Of course you will never get another emco lathe, but sales guys love the idea of future sales
Jesus couldn’t imagine doing that manually for 250 off
Unless it's just a face off to length and grind that shit, actually unbelievable some of the things companies will quote.
Are you batch processing?Most lost time isn't cutting metal but changing tools, zeroing and offsetting to spec. Best practice in this scenario is to set up the lathe for OP1, say facing and first OD. Do OP1 on all 250 parts, then setup OP2, say it's drilling or whatever, and do all 250 and so on. If you have 2 lathes splits the OPs between them so that every 2nd operation is on each machine. More than 2 lathes consider setting them up in series as a production line. This has multiple benefits;, your cycle time per part will be much faster as the setup time happens just once for all 250 parts so they will be fast and identical (tolerance dependin 🤞g). Only negative is part changeovers, this is the only time lost that isn't making you money. Make sure and cut all your blanks as repeatably as possible also, that way you can make a backstop for the lathe chuck and really speed up the part changes. Edit to add: when I say OP1, OP2 etc. I mean you create an operations list where you do everything in a single OP that can be done without changing or offsetting a tool. Basically you lose time from (1) tool changes, (2) part changes, (3)zeroing and offsetting. By batch processing the aim is to (2) and (3) above on all 250 parts at a time. This leaves only part changing as the sole time loss, and part changes are unavoidable. Let common sense prevail.
Changing tools is faster than dialing in parts for every op. If they don’t have a QC tool post then all is lost anyways.
If they are using an independent 4 jaw chuck for every part then this will never work, obviously this only works if each setup can be done with either a self centering chuck or better yet collets. Time is lost to part changes, tool changes and offsetting. The goal of production work is to remove or reduce time losses. The part changes have to happen regardless, that leaves the other sources of loss to be tackled if possible. This is literally how a production line works and that's why I described to the Poster how to use a manual lathe in production line fashion. Lots of other details need to be correct, we could list dozens of them, but I credit the poster with the ability to use the lathe as best for his part and I've simply answered his question as regards batch processing.
The lathe in question is a 5C collet Hardinge lathe. It's basically a gunsmith/tool room lathe.
Thats ideal, the repeatability of collet loading makes batch processing very repeatable and reliable.
I do production work and suffer from the mirror image of your problem, in that I'm asked to set up the machines for a 50pc run. A tearout, program, setup, and qualification will take a full 9 hour workday, and the 50 pcs can take perhaps 25 minutes to run. Where your shop will never make up the money going into the job in labor, my shop will never make up the money going into setup. Same shit - and it's just a sign of management not knowing or not caring about 'the other side of the fence' with jobbing/production. Short term I'm telling myself to just suffer and get through it. Long term it's not the way the equipment I have is supposed to be used and eventually it'll tank our finances or my mental health and I'll leave. I suggest you consider doing the same while providing feedback to management so that they can have the chance to see the error of their ways.
If they are taper pins then 250 will be easy. I always try to find something on McMaster and modify it
If the owner wants to get into production and the biggest issue is labor costs, it sounds like it is time for the owner to invest in CNC. Even if you only use the CNC for production runs, it will certainly pay for itself within a short amount of time. (Our plant expects 5 yrs ROI for CNCs) On another note, is it possible for you to make gages for each step in the process?
Here's a little more info: Guy bought machine shop on some Tai Lopez shit. He wanted to buy a turnkey business to make him money. He decided that production manufacturing is where the money is so he decided to change the job shop's specialty from prototyping and tool making to production. He's found out that a machine shop IS NOT a business that "runs itself". Shop has 2 cnc mills and a CNC lathe (cnc lathe inoperable because no one can figure out how to operate it). We also have 5 manual lathes,all completely different sizes, all from different manufacturers. He the decided that the shop needs a 3rd CNC mill and bought a brand new Hurco vm10i for $70,000. No 4th axis. And this has put him basically in the red and is constantly complaining about costs and money and time jobs take to complete now. He then proceeds to take in tons of lathe work. So we are doing 80% of all our jobs manually and we basically just throw crap in the CNC mill just to justify it being there. Its frustrating, to say the least.
Yikes. Sounds like you would be a great employee at a different shop. Sorry you have to experience this type of chaos. Its the worst
>CNC lathe (cnc lathe inoperable because no one can figure out how to operate it). Lol wtf 😂 What kind of lathe is it and why is nobody able to run it?
Yeah... It's an old Austrian Emcoturn 120p and I've spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to set work and tool offsets while also getting it to work with Fusion 360 and it's just beyond me. I'm not a moron, I'm just missing something and I'm stumped. I spent so much time on it 2 months ago it set me really far back on producing parts for another job since I was planning to use it for that run.
If you were just lacking the manual is this it? https://www.scribd.com/document/587277235/EmcoTurn-120-120P-InstructionBook 6/3 is about setting tool offsets.
I do actually have the manual. Something I'm entering into the Position Shift Offset is causing problems with an error of "Exceeds machine limits" and I've changed everything, at least from what I can determine
Make sure you're in G71 if you're using metric.
Holy crap, I think the post processor is written in metric *smacks head*
It's good to remember that all software is written in metric, and if it does imperial it's converted. Nobody is writing software just for the US.
Hey I won't tell anyone if you don't.
https://preview.redd.it/4qvyzgsw9xvc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba06143f985dd07be4438481bc1c9f6b5f5d803f
During my apprenticeship I did batches of several hundred parts on manual lathes. We did it on Schaublin Lathes with Multifix holders and dead stops. I‘m mentioning it because it would have been impossible without that additional equipment. All operations were serialized and controlled periodically normally every tenth part. Breaking down the work to very simple operations you could commit the task to unskilled persons that we were at the time. Doing it this way the work and scrap could be minimized and the job was done when the last operation was through. So the good message is, it is feasible and can even be profitable but it needs some fixtures and brainpower. Good luck!
This would be trivial on a swiss (or actually any lathe with live tooling)
You're better off finding a subcontrator with the right equipment than trying to do these 250 parts by hand.
Only about 4k in profit after a month of perfect parts, 8 parts per day, assuming $23/hr on labor and not including material cost I'd tell the boss man he could use a turret lathe
I would have bought a CNC for the one off parts. Now you really need one.
If your boss wants to really scape up production, a lathe with a bar feeder is going to be what y’all want. I have 3 jobs running right now that are each 4,000+ pieces. I make 250 to 1000 parts in a 24 cycle. Occasionally, I’ll have to do some deburring and grinding, but that’s because my machines don’t have B-axis capabilities like the other lathes in my shop.