New tools for the Haas TL1 lathe

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
Our shop has a Haas TL1 CNC lathe, and it's a fine piece of equipment. When I bought it there were two options availablen for tooling - a four position automated tool holder, or a dovetail wedge type toolholder. I selected the manual option, it allows as many as 99 tools to be used and is cheaper and more versatile in my opinion. There are two shortcomings to this. The toolholder blocks are heavy and having to handle numerous tools can be wearying. And while most machining operations can be performed pretty well, drilling and tapping can be a little iffy.

Many of the parts we make are less than 2" diameter and just a few inches long. The TL1 has a 16" swing and 8 full inches of cross slide travel. After a little thought I came up with a new toolholder setup that accomplishes the following goals:

1. Minimize tool changes.
2. Be able to drill holes using the carriage instead of the tailstock.
3. Be able to tap holes under power.

This photo shows the TL1 as it was delivered. You can see the cross slide has no compound rest (it's CNC and doesn't need one). The wedge type toolholder attaches to the cross slide by bolting it to a mounting block with a T-slot. The block is about 3.5" high, 4" thick, and 5.5" long and attaches to the cross slide with two 5/8-11 socket head cap screws. There are 9 tapped holes in the cross slide so the standard tool block can be attached in several places and orientations. I planned to take advantage of these extra holes.
HaasTL1toolblock.jpg

After doing some research on available tooling I found a place that sells collet holders on round bars. Since I already use ER16 and ER32 collets on the CNC mill it would be a low cost way to hold drills and taps - yes, they make collets that are designed specifically to hold taps without slipping.

After taking measurements and aided with the Haas documentation I was able to design a toolholder setup that would replace the standard mounting block with a 12" long one, allowing a series of different tool holders to be bolted in place. Here is a screen shot of the basic components (not all shown).

toolblockscreendump.jpg

Just to be sure I wasn't missing something I decided to make a full size 3D model of the basic parts. Since I don't have rapid prototyper I did it the way I learned to do it 45 years ago in high school when I took pencil and paper drafting. I made "sheet metal layouts" of the surfaces, printed out the parts at full size, cut them out, folded them and taped them together. It's sloppy, my teacher then would have scolded me, but it was good enough to take out to the shop and put on the cross slide end to end with the existing block. This enabled me to jog the carriage and slide around in real space around demo parts to check for clearances and potential problems.

papermodel.jpg

Once I was sure that the idea was viable we set about making the actual pieces. It was all rather straight forward machine work. The base mounting block was made from three pieces, I didn't want to buy a special T-slot cutter. The base and top bars align with three 1/4" pins each. The photo shown here shows the assembled mounting block in the CNC mill vise, the top and inside edges have just been machined. A blank toolholder block and T-slot nut is there to test the width of the slot.

baseblock1.jpg

After machining the base it was mounted on the cross slide and indicated in straight . In order to make the holes in the toolholder blocks concentric with the spindle rotation we used the lathe opposite the way it normally is used. We bolted the blocks in place and ran the tools in the lathe chuck. To start out we mounted a 1.5" OD adapter w/a #4 Morse taper socket in the chuck, then we used the chuck to hold a needle point shaft. We used this to find the center of the block and recorded that offset. Then we switched to a center drill, next a 3/8" drill, followed by a 7/8" drill. For the toolholders with 1" and 1.25" holes we stopped there and switched to the boring bar setup. The block shown has a 1.5" ID finished hole, so the chuck was removed and a three flute 1-1/4" core drill with a #4 Morse shank was used to enlarge the hole.

boringhole1.jpg boringhole2.jpg boringhole3.jpg boringhole5.jpg

In order to finish the holes a homemade boring bar was made from a piece of 3/4" cold rolled rod. A cross hole was drilled and then broached to 1/4" square and a piece of HSS tool blank was used, The tailstock center supports the end of the bar and the carriage travel provides the feed. The three shots below show a tool holder that will end up with a 1" hole. The hole was bored to within about 0.020 of finished size and a 1" machine reamer was run through the bore.boringhole8.jpg
 

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KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
Hit my photo limit, here is the continuation.

boringhole9.jpg boringhole7.jpg

When all the parts were finished we sent them out to a local place called Midwest Hydrographics. They do all sorts of dip coatings, anodizing, and other surface treatments. We had them put on an industrial black coating. Here are all the parts on our worktable.

allparts.jpg

Along with the mounting block we have four 1.5" wide toolholder to hold round tools, three have 1" holes, 1 has a 1.25" hole. Two toolholders have rectangular cutouts to hold square shank tools. One toolholder is 2.5" wide and has a unique clamping mechanism. (I'll post a separate thread on this later.)

The first part we ran is shown here. It is aluminum, but the real part is 304 stainless steel. It is made from 5/8" rod turned down to 1/2", is about 1-3/8" long, has an .042 snap ring groove and a .422" thru hole.

samplepiece.jpg

Here is a picture of the tool holder setup. The right hand tool is a boring bar used for facing and turning (it works on the back side of the part and you have to run the spindle in reverse but that's no big deal). A center drill in a custom made bar is in the center position, and the left hand tool is a .422" drill. On the far right you can see the wedge type dovetail toolholder. The next photo shows a 0.042" wide grooving tool on the left and a carbide cutoff tool on the right. These two tools have to be swapped in and out as needed but the other three tools are fixed firmly in place.

slidesetup.jpg groovecutofftools.jpg

This tooling setup adds a lot to the TL1. It won't really speed things up too much, but it adds versatility and meets all my goals - reduced fatigue from reduced tool changes, and the ability to drill and tap under power. No more drilling using the Armstrong method with the tailstock! It also aids accuracy, changing tools can introduce slight repositioning errors. Fixing them firmly in place eliminates the repositioning errors.

All in all I'm satisfied with the end result and plan to utilize the extended capabilities at every opportunity.
 
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Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
Dang, that was a bunch to digest.
Greatest thing about machine tools is being able to make tooling for those tools.

Damn, I really need a mill now. Sigh
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
I tried to keep the write up as short as possible, but what I've covered is a result of several weeks of design and drafting work and numerous hours of actual machining. I wrote more than a dozen CNC programs for both the mill and the lathe to make the component parts. When the first part came off my apprentice and I were really stoked, it's a nice feeling to see an idea become reality.

Scott, my apprentice, colleague, nephew and friend used to joke with me after I switched him from the manual lathe to the CNC lathe. He complained about how hard it was to change tools and push buttons. Now he complains about having to move the coolant hose from one tool to the next. Some folks are never happy! Seriously, I could not have a better person to work with, he is a really good guy.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
Very cool. You wind up with sort of a linear, in-place tool changout storage rack....only the tool change is just a command to
move on the X axis (I think, or is the cross axis the Y axis? never worked with CNC lathe). Great idea to use the lathe spindle
as a horizontal mill to bore and ream your holes.

Next you need to add in a powered spindle to the stack. :D Couple of bearings, a shaft with
a ER collet on it, or chuck and an air drill on the back to power it. Not sure how you might use
it, but if there is a need, that is doable.

Neat solution and you earned a whole lot of money those days for that work - will pay dividends for years. Neat to make tooling!

Brad,
Get a mill table for your lathe and run it like Keith did - make it a horizontal mill. :rolleyes::eek::D:D

Bill
 

smokeywolf

Well-Known Member
Milling on the lathe can be done to good effect, but most often can't replace the convenience of a NC knee mill. Not talking about Keith's situation, but a home shop doing mostly one-offs with the occasional very short production run.

I'd love to someday be able to justify a MILLPWR NC retrofit for my Bridgeport.
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
What a great example of the process from need, to concept, to design, then final product. Best of all, it worked as designed.
Looking at what was involved to get from concept to product gives some indication of why stuff like this is so expensive to have made for you. Add up your time and it's value and you can't afford what you made!
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
I have $250 in the steel and various cap screws (material). My friend at Midwest Hydrographics charged me $175 for the bead blast/blackening, which I thought was a bargain. (Did I mention the owner is a former student of mine?) Scott probably has 20 hours in this, so roughly $500 in direct labor costs. The four collet adapters (which weren't used on the first job but will be used today on a new job) cost about $300, and the 1" boring bar was another $70. I don't draw a paycheck, so the 40-50 hours of design work and another 40-50 hours of actual machining that I put in cost the business $0.

Brad, you're right. If I charged myself for my own labor I couldn't afford to work for myself (huh?).

Bill, I like the idea of a powered collet shaft in theory, but unfortunately the lathe spindle does not lock in place. There was no option available for programmable spindle positioning on this model lathe. (Note: many CNC lathes have programmable spindle positioning, which turns the spindle into a rotary/indexing table. With this and a powered subspindle you can coordinate the motion of the spindle with the cross slide and carriage to drill bolt circles, mill slots, etc.) Without positioning and especially locking of the spindle I think drilling or milling would be very difficult. (Darn it, now you're making me think of designing a spindle lock.)

I'm anxious to get a job that requires tapping, the lathe has all the proper firmware to execute tapping cycles, but we've never been able to do it because of lack of a suitable toolholder. We've had to add extra operations to power tap on the CNC mill. That really messes with work scheduling when you can't finish what should be a lathe-only part because you have to tap a hole on the mill and you've got a week or more work already backed up for that machine.

We are setting up on a job today that will drill a hole 4"+ deep into a 8" long bar of 8620 steel. The bar is 2" dia and ultimately ends up with a 1.25" hole from end to end. Basically we are making thick wall tubing as the raw material for another set of lathe operations. We will center drill, drill to 7/16" dia, then to 3/4" dia. Flip end to end and do the same thing. Swap the tools for 1" and 1.25" drills and do the same thing until you get a thru hole. We have done this in the past - but we had to tie up the CNC mill for the first series of drills, and by hand on the manual lathe for the second series of drills. It is very physically demanding. Now we will do it all on the lathe and the only work will be swapping the parts in and out, the drills will never need to be changed.
 

smokeywolf

Well-Known Member
Looking at what was involved to get from concept to product gives some indication of why stuff like this is so expensive to have made for you.

Saw a statement or "catch phrase" on the back of a truck a few weeks ago that made me a bit sad that I hadn't thought of it. "Quality is not expensive... It's priceless!".
 

smokeywolf

Well-Known Member
Possibly, but I don't think so.

Just checked the internet. It seems that a lot of businesses use the phrase, but an outfit called "WireMasters Inc." has owned a trademark on the phrase for the past 8 years.
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
There is also this.

If you think it's expensive to hire a professional wait until you hire an amateur.

Bet Ian can relate to that.
 

Intheshop

Banned
Thanks for the brain jog....

Spindle locked and as a rotory table(in our case a welding positioner utilizing old junky lathe parts).And also about the "sheet metal" origami,haha.

Have seen,multi T slot carriages/crosslides on old bigarse lathes.Mighty useful.
 

smokeywolf

Well-Known Member
MGM Weld Shop fabricated a fixture that clamped to the ways on the 19 X 80 circa 1919 Lodge & Shipley lathe in my shop and twisted square bar stock for wrought iron railings for stairs, landings, balconies around the studio and also for sets.
That was our "big lathe". Only lathe in my shop that had a chain fall on a trolley over it for mounting and dismounting chucks and faceplates. That was also the lathe you'd set up on if you needed a length of 3.625 dia. stainless right now and all you had in the shop was a piece of 6" dia. With the right grind on a piece of Stellite, Tantung or even high cobalt HS you could take .400" off the total dia. per pass.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
Good grief. 0.400" per pass, on SS! Wow, now that was a horse of a machine.
If we are going for "biggest lathes"......We scrapped out our big lathe at work about
15 years ago. The faceplate was ~6 ft in diameter, would take a workpiece up to about
12 ft long, not exactly sure, just saw it a couple of times. We hadn't used it in years.
The tailstock was about like two home chest deep freezes stacked up, solid steel.

What horsepower did that Lodge and Shipley lathe have driving it? Must have been a lot.

Keith, if you can work out a geared stepper motor drive for the spindle as an alternate
drive system (thinking like "back gear") you could then index the spindle with the stepper
motor. Gilmer belt would work, but not likely sufficiently rigid.

Bill
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
Bill, we've never done any parts where an indexable lathe spindle would be needed, so as neat as it would be to make/have one it doesn't seem like it would be worth the time and trouble. However, I don't think it would be that hard to make a spindle lock that could be attached to the outboard end of the spindle. For drilling single holes or cutting a cross slot that would work fine.

The biggest benefit so far has been drilling out solid 2" dia 8620 bars to have a 1.25" thru hole. We finished the first step, which was to drill out to 3/4" using two drills. Today we started drilling out to 1.25" using two more drills. Never have to change the drills once set up, smooth drilling under power, so far it's working great.

drillsetup1.jpg

That's a three flute core drill in the far toolholder. Note that it is mounted in a socket with a #4 Morse taper hole, until now I've only been able to use this drill in the tailstock of either lathe. The socket is clamped into the toolholder by an un-original but mechanically interesting method. When I get time I'll do a short writeup about it.

It's nice having independent tool blocks, but there are some jobs that if we did them often enough I'd make a tool block big enough to permanently mount the specific tools needed in known locations so you could just bolt down all the tools at once, indicate in one tool or reference hole, and know where all the other tools are relative to the reference position. Would make setting up very fast and easy.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
If you aren't getting parts where a CNC indexable chuck would be useful, of course you shouldn't spend any time building it! :D

Very nice rig. Linear "turret" lathe?

Bill
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
Here are a couple photos of the first part we ran with our new tooling. It is part of an assembly that holds a fuel tester/collector for use on kit built/light aircraft. Our customer buys the plastic tester, makes the brackets and has them blackened, and assembles the final product using standard off the shelf stuff like springs and C-clips. The only machined product is our stainless steel tube plunger. The end of the tester which you can't see because it is down in our tube is a Phillips head screwdriver tip. It is used to remove a cover to get to the gas tank. This assembly makes it easy to insert/remove the tester but still holds it quite securely.

tester1.jpg
tester2.jpg

I understand this is not a gun part, and is a little off topic. But many gun parts are made the same way, on the same types of machines. I could change tools slightly and rewrite a little code and be making recoil spring plugs for 1911s. Sometimes HOW something is made is more interesting to me than WHAT is being made.
 

smokeywolf

Well-Known Member
Exactly why a "class A" machinist can go from making boat parts to gun parts to aerospace parts to medical device parts. What the part will be used for makes little difference. Setup & tooling is largely determined by, part material, tolerances, and how many will you have to turn out.