CNC Toolholder Interview with Jack Burley, President & COO of BIG KAISER

good morning folks i have a story to tell a few years ago i was hanging out with this guy jack burley and a bunch of other machinists and there was a conversation going on about tool holders and i'm just kind of listening in the back of my head and so people were throwing out some stats and numbers in design and engineering behind tool holders and then jack said something to the tune of i helped develop the iso standard and i thought i'm going to listen to that guy for years been wanting to get jack on camera to talk about tool holders and specifically one of the questions that i've heard some controversial opinions on which is should you balance a tool holder so jack can you introduce yourself and who you are at big kaiser your history there i'd love to talk about balancing but also a general primer on you know the role of tool holder plays why it's so important for making accurate parts tool life all that stuff you're so passionate about hey thanks for having me here today um always good to see you shop it's been a long time but uh my name is jack burley i'm the president of big kaiser precision tooling and uh i think when we look at tool holders and its importance and and how it works in the machining strategy it's often overlooked it's not something that's super critical for a lot of operators and programmers but it does play a big role and you know the performance of the cutting tool and the machine is really dependent on how well the tool holder connects all these things together and i've always been an advocate that you know you're gonna have a process that needs every part of it right and the tool holder is very commonly overlooked it's good enough to use this it's good enough to use that but every cutting tool needs its own type of tool holder and to get the optimum performance i think you really got to look carefully at what you may have done in the past and what you should be doing because that technology changes a lot tool holder technology it does yes really there's a lot of different types and varieties out there and it's it's a it's a shifting target standard machines typically use a steep tapered tool holder like a cat 40 or a cat50 or a bt or bt30 um and that's not going to go away because it is an easy product to to use and and reproduce and it's uh very common i don't think that's going to go away but there's new ones out there uh like the hsk which is starting to gain a lot more popularity uh for a wide range of operations like aerospace dye mold and electronics and all that on the few times i've had the chance to see shops in europe at the risk of making a gross generalization cat 40 is gone there and hsk uh which is actually really cool because you know the way a cat 40 works with a pool stud is it decreases its clamping pressure as you spin up the rpms with an hsk you don't have to have a pool stud and the i'm going to you're going to describe this better than me but the internal clamping nature is such that you've got dual contact taper and you actually increase the the rigidity of that rotating tool assembly as you increase your rpms yeah that's in a manner of speaking correct that the clamping system goes inside the tool holder instead of trying to clamp on a bolt on the outside of the holder like a cat or a bt so in essence yes as you increase the speeds the clamping fingers are trying to naturally go out with it because everything does elastically move due to high-speed rotation so the hsk has that advantage but it also has that disadvantage and i say that because on a steep taper tool holder that's got some length to it it's got the bolt on the outside which pulls it in um you can now though take a very short tool holder and you can take a long cutting tool and project it down inside okay so you're actually able to get a lot of the transfer of that power onto the cutting tool right by the bearings if you have that option you know if it's possible interesting in the case of hsk and i just ran across this before a couple days ago you're restricted there because that's all going inside there now so your minimum gauge length out of the spindle face is at least one inch got it because you can't put anything down inside there right you got the the retention system and you've got the the coolant nozzles and all that stuff in there so it but it does have the the accuracy of expanding due to high speed and that's where steep taper doesn't have that option because as that spindle does try to grow it's going to pull it down in so you don't have as good of control on z axis like hsk because you got a stopper there as far as the face contact and steep taper doesn't always have that unless you use dual contact like big plus well that's as i say with dual contact 40 big plus you have that positive stop gauge length right you do and that's that's good to a point for rigidity but for high speed operation you still will see a slight deformation of the spindle due to high speed so because it's moving out you might lose a little bit of your tapered contact compared to hsk got it but conversely you have a much wider length or longer length of taper engagement than you do with hsk got it so if you're tooling up a new machine you know what i think about with a holder i usually think of tir and actually that's another funny anecdote when i was just getting to know you i was researching separately on tool life and part accuracy part quality and your name showed up on a study that talks about a correlation between i think it was every tenth of additional run out or total indicated reading i guess is the technical equivalent of tir but every 10th you have can result in a double digit decrease in tool life it's substantial but i use the 10th equals 10 which means a 10th runout adds or subtracts 10 percent tool life so if you go from five tenths to four tenths you should increase your tool life by ten percent and conversely if you go from five tenths to six tenths you should decrease it by ten percent that's crazy so it would double if you went from five tenths to a thou right if you went from a high precision collet chuck to say a side lock end mill holder so everything's a trade-off and a balance so what am i looking for am i looking for tir i'm looking for something that's absolutely going to hold that tool in place and if i'm looking at roughing operations with a half inch end mill i'm probably not looking so much for the tirs i am just for raw clamping force and i compromise a little bit of that tir if i'm fine finishing i want the absolute best tir and that's where i start looking at things like collet chucks hydraulic chucks but if i'm roughing tir is maybe not so critical and i'm going to be looking at the gripping force the power shrink fit could be an option side lock end mill holders if i just want to make sure that i absolutely do not pull out the end mill when i'm cutting because we all know that it's tragic when an end mill pulls out slips or does anything that that's usually scrap or a ruin part yes or something makes for great blooper videos though on youtube no we so we we started out using er 16s uh which i don't think were unusual in that er 32s and then you know the run outs i would say not bad not a great scientific answer but we realize we care about it especially when we're doing that small work the detail work on the small tools and so that's where i think we picked up one of the mega chucks that has your high precision collets it's got that really cool bearing wrench and the run out is i mean it's incredible it does uh have the advantage of the not just the tir that you're looking for but the mask the damping so i always like to say when you're roughing you know the slender tool holders like heat shrink and all that aren't always an advantage it's only sometimes a disadvantage you want the mass around the tool to dampen it and help drive the power from the machine through the tool holder into the tool without the vibration would you say that dampening holds true even if you're say um surfacing with a 330 second end mill or or slotting with a 1 16th end mill um well obviously then the damping doesn't have to be as critical because you know when you look at the natural frequency of this machine and spindle of course it's not going to absorb at the same level on a small micro tool as it would on a larger tool okay um it's important but not nearly as critical no so then you know when you're looking at a 16th end mill or a 3 16 usually collet systems are very adequate to hold those kind of tools but hydraulics do exist in the market that you can put those small tools into and i think for the high speed operation they do bring some advantage it's actually great uh segway two a question i've always wondered which is from a cost standpoint and not knowing anything more about a specific application would you recommend a precision collet chuck or would you recommend a hydraulic where you've also got to buy relatively expensive sleeves or bushings to get it down to the size if you've standardized your shop on a nominal shank diameter of say four millimeters eighth inch six millimeter the hydraulic has the advantage because now you don't have to use collets right when you whenever you do machining below um three millimeters you're usually working off a common shake like eighth inch or three millimeter so you're not going to need collets and that that makes perfect sense in those small tools to standardize on a common sink too older and never use the collets now if you've got wire size drills and all kinds of small cutting tools that don't have the common shakes then obviously the collar is the best way to go fair enough and and again the impurities of the mark or the system that you're putting into um if you're you're running relatively clean materials like stainless steel easy to clean collets make a lot of sense but if you're in explain that dustier things like uh carbon fiber or you're dealing with fiberglass and things like that where it's really the dust and and the sludge that comes out of that is really hard to clean then something simple like heat shrink or hydraulic would make more sense it's interesting completely obvious point that i never thought of which is the sealed nature of the system in the you know machining cast iron versus yeah 4140 right huh um okay this is the question i think this is so fascinating could you just describe what is this iso standard the g 2.5 we hear balance up to and then share your thoughts on balancing tool holders well i i was involved in establishing the standards i was on the committee i didn't develop there were some mathematicians and scientists behind that um but it's called the iso 16084 okay it's uh it was rolled out officially about three or four years ago and what it tries to do is bring some economies of scale to the world of tool holder balancing we are a tool holder producer that's what we do that's all we do is produce tool holders so we know how to make them we know how to balance them what this standard tries to do is say to companies like us here's how we need to balance our tools to be used in a real world situation because not every situation is the same which is the interpretation of g 2.5 okay your situation is not the same as a shop across the street which might be running much larger parts okay with lower speeds you're running smaller parts with higher speeds but why is tool holder balancing the same from your shop to their shop although they're completely different worlds and you need two different sets of parameters to work with okay so what this standard does it tries to say if i'm the bigger shop and i don't need that level of sophistication i still want to balance my tools what is a practical safe limit that will apply that i won't damage the machine and i'll get the best performance for the cost of balancing that tool versus maybe you need something more precise because you're dealing with something higher speed and you're dealing with finer finishes and you're dealing with smaller interfaces okay why try to balance a 50 taper two holder to the same properties of an hsk32 got it one's going to go 800 and what's unique about that standard is the old standard i should say which is you know more than 80 years old is the smaller the tool holder the more precise you have to balance it and the bigger the tool holder the less you have to balance it so on the same machine let's say you have one that's equipped with a 40 taper spindle and a 40 taper spindle can have a wide range of different weights of tools that go into it you could have a super light er 16 you know which only maybe weighs three or four pounds and then you could have a big long heavy face mill weighs 15 pounds right so you're saying okay it's a 20 000 rpm spindle either way one i'm probably going to be able to run 20 000 when i'm probably not hopefully not um so i do try to balance the lighter tools better but on that same machine i'm supposed to balance them for 20 000 rpm that heavier tool has a lot more tolerance than the lighter one which is really the backwards way of looking at the heavier the tool should be balanced more precisely than the lighter ones because it's going to do more damage well that's what i was thinking a a heavier tool may rotate slower but it has an imbalance could destroy spindle bearings much faster than a lighter tool yeah right so what the new standard does it tries to take those values into consideration okay it also takes into consideration not just the length and the weight of the tool but the type of operation you want to do so if i'm a piloted type of cutting tool which once it goes like a drill is a piloted tool if it engages into the workpiece it's really now not free spinning anymore it's got a piece that's no longer a cantilever it's it's supported why do i need to balance that so critically other than the time it takes to turn it on and put it into the part versus an end mill now that's free cutting all the time right that should be uh balanced much more precisely so there's different levels standard fine and then ultimate balancing for that and this happens when you guys machine a holder it is balanced at your factory but subsequent to post changes downstream depending on the type of collet nut or the type of tool i mean a traditional rotating tool is not imbalanced like like we use a boring head from you guys i assume that that has to have imbalances because of the design of the boring head what's on the left is not mirrored perfectly on the right when we make those tools we know what all the known imbalances are characteristic to that design and we correct for those okay so we know what's inside there we know how to adjust even for a boring bar all of your boring heads uh we know where it's set to have the optimum balance for it now as you adjust it you change that right right so we have automatic balancing tools but you know for the smaller ones usually we got them balanced in a position at 10 000 rpm you're not going to have any issues with it now if you go to 20 000 rpm and you shift the size substantially awful where it should be where we recommend you're going to have imbalance issues um and that's where you're going to start to see uh you know the vibration really comes in the machine will hum you'll hear it you'll hear it yes when a machine is humming just when it's rotating a tool holder you know you're over speeding the balance of that the tool holder should be used so as soon as you start turning down the rpm you'll notice that the humming starts to reduce you're basically minimizing the the amount of centrifugal force or asymmetrical force that spindle's seeing it's basically the bearings taking and absorbing the vibration got it so yeah all boring bars should be balanced at a position now some of the older technologies don't all of ours do and that's why you know some people look at our our equipment and he says oh you got so many accessories well let's try to maintain the optimum balance for the tool running concentrically got it because every boring tool has to run off center to do its job got it and so what about a traditional uh high precision collet chuck that's balanced at the factory and is good to go generally if it's a quality product um yes we're gonna do all the uh post heat treat grinding hard turning we're gonna put the clamping nut on which has been piloted that's an important feature when you look at a clamping nut if it's just locating on the threads of course you've got some areas that that can distribute differently yep so um a big area where i see mistakes is uh you buy a tool holder and it says certified to 20 000 rpm the certification usually from these companies which is a sheet that says here we balanced it and look at how good it is but they haven't put anything on it it's it's free of a clamping nut it's free of a collet it doesn't have a pull stud it's basically a shaft got it right but what's changing now is now you start adding parts so we we assemble all those parts in knowing that we're going to try to maintain concentricity throughout it's kind of like you go out and buy a new pair of tires for your car um if you balance just the rim right and say okay it's balanced now you put the tires on it and go try to use it it's not going to be balanced anymore and that's what you're doing with these tool holders that are really certified at the factory they haven't been assembled properly to put it all together now quality products with piloted precision components minimizes that and you shouldn't need to balance okay within normal operating limits like 12 000 rpm on a 40 taper spindle at 20 000 rpm i'm going to say yes balancing should be looked at okay i'm going to say it only exists though for the fine finishing so if you're trying to get the good finishes and you're doing the ball nose milling and the slotting and you're looking for the ideal surface finishes then over 12 000 rpm and the standard would tell you go from standard to fine balancing and balancing because that's happening at the high rpms is really not correlated to what you may measure as a tir when you're just rotating a tool or putting it in a pre-setter it it doesn't but it does because the more tir you have the more imbalance you have okay so yeah again going back to a quality product a collet chuck for example that gives you only three microns or five microns of tir yes you get better surface finish because you're engaging the flutes more evenly but you're also improving the balance because that's the eccentricity value of the tool holder assembly if that piece of carbide is offset by five tenths that's an eccentric value that's adding to the imbalance so even though it's a quality tool sitting off center isn't helping and if for folks watching that don't even know what balancing is i always think of it as putting it into a specialized machine and then ultimately adding either weights or drilling material is that a fair yeah that's pretty close to what it does the balancing machine basically is a spindle like uh on your machine doesn't run at the rpm that you need to to use it at but all it's doing is got some piezo crystals in there which measures the force of that tool trying to spin and it measures these forces so that you know where you need to take heavy or light spots off of the tool in some places you have to add tool weight by putting screws in other places you might reduce it by subtracting such as milling or grinding off of it good and i i don't like to do that um the process where you start milling and grinding tools because once you do it first time that should be all you ever do it but if you have a non-repeating system because the collet chuck or whatever doesn't repeat you start chasing around and you start putting cuts all over it where that's where the balancing screws would be much better is there a shop like ours you know we don't have a balancer i don't think we ever would justify one or need one but let's say i really did have a couple of tools i wanted dialed in and perfected is there is that a service do people ever send out tools assemblies and have them balance extra yeah we we can balance them most of the two older companies will do that service for you um what we're a little bit leery about though is tools that we don't produce and we don't know what's in it okay so if you send us a complicated uh reamer assembly which has all these adjusting systems built into it that we don't know about sure we we'd probably put the caveat yeah we'll do this but we don't know if we're going to cut into something inside there that might be a problem um adding weights always a little bit easier but it's complicated too because then it's cool folks hope you learned something hope you enjoyed jack thanks for visiting the the whole i completely agree with what you say people are so focused on hey i've got this brand of machine or i've got this software or this cutting tool but man the the role of the tool holder place and literally literally marrying them all together we've certainly grown to appreciate we check tir more than i ever thought we would and when we see the results you can see it sometimes the naked eye certainly with a loop or a microscope it matters for tool life or finish for accuracy yeah we're believers good to hear john thank you hey take care folks see you soon you

Channel: NYC CNC

Views: 20,222

Rating: 4.9193549 out of 5

Keywords: cnc, machine shop, nyc cnc, cnc machining, cnc milling, learn cnc, john saunders, manufacturing entrepreneurship, cnc toolholders, big kaiser precision tooling, balancing toolholders, jack burley, ISO standard 16084, boring heads, steep taper toolholders, hydraulic chucks, er collets, bt toolholders, hsk toolholders, how to pick the best cnc toolholder, how to find the right cnc toolholder, which cnc toolholder should i use, er toolholders, saunders machine works

Id: -oogpKUXTxE

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021