When you are cutting thousands of parts on your Swiss Lathe, every second counts. It’s always tempting to aim for better feeds and speeds through upgrades, but there are other options you might be missing. In this quick tip, Brad talks about how the chucking part of your process can be sped up.
Video Transcript:
Today, we’re talking about producing thousands of parts. The faster you can make them, the more efficient you can be. In today’s quick tip, I’m going to show you a clever trick to shave a few seconds off your cycle time.
I’m standing here with one of our Citizen Swift lathes, which are designed to produce thousands of parts very quickly. Obviously, the faster you can make a part, the more you can make in a given amount of time, as long as you don’t sacrifice quality. The idea is to get as many done as quickly as possible so you can move on to the next job.
Typically, people think about speeds and feeds when they’re talking about shaving time off a program. However, with the right part, you can actually eliminate any unnecessary machine movements to save time. For instance, we had an order for 100,000 parts, and across that many parts, every single movement matters. We’ve eliminated some of the chucking processes.
In a normal part production, the material starts at the end, the machine chucks back the length of whatever the part will be, and the machine comes in to shape the part. At some point, it cuts it off, and the process starts over: chuck back, machine the part, cut it off, and repeat. Every time you perform this chucking motion, time is spent. It might not seem like much, but over 100,000 parts, it starts to add up.
What we’ve done is chuck back far enough to make several parts because the machine is also allowed to move forward and back. It moves just enough forward to make a single part, cuts it off, and then moves forward again to make another single part, and so on, until we eventually reach another chucking stage. This method has reduced the number of chucking operations from five to one, saving a few seconds per part. Over the course of 100,000 parts, this time savings adds up, allowing us to finish earlier and move on to the next project.
If you’re trying to reduce your cycle time and improve your efficiency, remember that every machine movement counts. For more quick tips like this, subscribe to our blog.