Before buying a machine-tool presetting device, small machine shops often view it as high-end equipment they can manage without, figuring that old-school manual setup has worked well enough so far.
Once they get one, however, they almost invariably wish they had made the purchase sooner, says Brendt Holden, president of Haimer USA.
And they regret the lost savings of time and money as they realize payoffs from their investment that include up to a 70 percent reduction in setup time, higher productivity, improved workpiece accuracy and longer tool life.
Presetters shorten setup time by gauging the dimensions of a tooling assembly—a cutting tool plus a holder—to ensure alignment with both the CNC machine that will use it and the workpieces it will cut and shape.
It’s a far more efficient process than determining coordinates by touching off, or connecting the assembly to the machine spindle to measure the height offset, something Holden himself did as a machinist at a small business in the early 1990s.
The time required for the manual process wasn’t always factored into price quotes for customers, he recalls, creating confusion about production timetables and masking the real cost of the job.
“With a presetter, we could have saved a lot of time and had the machine running more,” Holden says.
Talk to Us!
Leave a reply
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *