- So I've owned the Haas ST-30Y lathe for a period of one year. And in this video I'm gonna
show you how we tooled it up, how we set it up, including the bar feeder and answer two critical questions. Number one: does it hold
advertised tolerances? And number two: was it worth it? Let's get started. (bombastic rock music) So we're talking about the ST-30Y lathe from Haas Automation today. And as a reminder, I
purchased this machine to increase our capacity
for our turns components. And even some of those components that could easily come off a mill, we're gonna move that over onto this lathe because it does have Y
travel, live tooling, and dual spindle, so that's a nice thing. We've actually made
parts that you probably wouldn't think were made on
a lathe, but we've moved 'em over here just to take the
excess burden off of the mills for simple, low dollar,
low tolerance components. So when I purchased this, my only frame of reference was the two
Doosan lathes we have, which are fantastic, well-built machines. This was one of those things where it was a newer machine. This is an ST-30Y reboot. It kind of competes with the
DS-30, which is dual spindle, very much larger machine. This lathe in particular is
just a little bit more compact, but compared to our Doosan
with the same setup, BMT45. This is BMT65, the next, or actually, two steps up in BMT tooling. And it's just, I like the larger size. I got to say setups with the Doosan, just because it's a more
compact working envelope, it gets a little nervous Here, we know that if the subspindle is jogged all the way forward, and we accidentally or unintentionally or we just didn't realize that the turret is going to
rotate to a different tool, it has plenty of clearance. Now, the live tool Doosan
we have has safety zones where to get down close to the workpiece, you have to override it saying, hey, this is a zone where it might crash. It's okay to cross over. I proofed out the program. As far as I can tell, the Haas does not have that capability, but really I haven't missed it because none of the sheet
metal, none of the housings, none of that stuff even
comes close to colliding like you have to watch out for
some of that on the Doosan, so that's one thing I really like. Let me get you a closer look and show you how we tooled it up. Okay, so the machine itself came with a lot of these tool holders. We used most of them, but we did buy a few more
from Command Tooling Systems. I'll show you those in a second. But what I really liked was
these Benz live tool holders. That's kinda like the standard issue. I think the Doosan came
with Exsys Eppinger brand. So far, I like these better. They're cool, they're quiet. I don't know if that's a
combination of the gearing or the motor, but I prefer
these over the Eppinger, and these are also, I
think they're from Germany, so really high quality. Let me rotate it. I'll show you the rest of the tools. Okay, we did buy three extra tool holders because they were in a configuration that just didn't come with the machine. So the first two are Command because they hold both direction to mill on the main and the sub. This is our CNMG and our VNMG
held at a 45 degree angle. These were from Command. If I remember correctly,
$700 or $800 a piece, and we've pretty much tooled it up 100% with tooling from Kyocera, pretty much my favorite
new tooling company. Fantastic product offering
and great service, really happy with them. This particular CNMG tool
holder delivers cutting fluid right to the face of the
insert through the clamp. Absolutely love it. It's given us fantastic performance, but this one is the star of the show. This is from Lyndex-Nikken,
and it holds six tools. The beauty of this is is, and you can only do this on a
lathe that has Y capabilities, is you can have like, we've,
this is tool block three. We have one tool here, which is T303, T313, tool 323, and then we
flip over and we go 353, 363, 373 that are sub facing, so you get a lot of bang for your buck out of this $1,000 tool holder, and it's great because you can dial in not just your center
line of X, but also in Y so you know your drills are
spinning true right on center. That's really important. A lot of times, if some of these
holders are not made right, or maybe the turret's been
bumped, you need to shim it. It's just a total pain. That's the nice thing,
probably the most useful thing that I've experienced with a Y capability, is you can dial it in, so
it's absolutely on center. Fantastic thing. And finally, speaking of
tooling, we also bought a probe. Now it's not in here, why? We're just not there yet. So I bought the probe, not so much for cutting down your time in setups, but for checking dimensions on parts, making sure that parts
are actually being cut, and that way we can run this in a lights out application unattended. Kind of the strategy is once we move to full lights out machining, we will cut parts using a far
more conservative tool program that has the tool probe that comes out to check for break detection,
wear on the inserts, as well as to check dimensions with this. Now, the thing is, that you typically don't want to inspect
parts on the same machine that it's cut on because if there's some type of thermal growth, it doesn't know that it. It just thinks it's on center, although the OD might be totally off, but this at least keeps
us in the ballpark, knowing that we've actually taken a cut that was supposed to be taken. So with that being said, let
me walk you through a setup including the Haas Servo Bar Feeder, probably my most favorite
part of this machine. Let's take a closer look. (upbeat rock music) So one of the things I've
really learned to love is the Servo Bar Feeder that
I bought with this machine. Let me just give you a quick walkthrough because I couldn't find
that much information just on other YouTube channels. The Haas channel had a
complete walkthrough. I'll give you a quick overview. So when you go to current commands, there's a bar feeder screen, and you just enter some basic information. Length of the longest bar,
which we cut all our bars to 48 inches, four feet,
and then we load them in. That's the maximum length. You can also put in a two foot, a 30 inch bar, a 12 inch bar. You can mix and match. You just need to tell
it that the longest bar that it will see is 48 inches. Next is the push length, which is a, actually,
it tells you right here. The push link is the cutoff with, so we use about an eighth-inch
wide cutoff parting tool, the actual part length, and
then the facing allowance. So when you total up the
face, the part length, and the width of the cutoff tool, that's what you put in. Here, it's 700 thousandths. Then the initial push length. I'll show you that in a minute with some footage, but basically how far from the face of the chuck do you want it to push, to begin cutting? And then the minimum clamping length. When you get to the end of the bar, how much should the collet actually hold before it switches to a new bar. In this instance, I'm holding
on just an inch-and-a-half. That's plenty. And then finally, the parts counter. You can set it to zero, and it's just gonna run, run, run. You could, an operator can load more bars. But in this, we did a
product run of 1,000 pieces, so we have 1,000 in there. From there you just walk
through, and it is very logical. It just tells you set up
one, load and measure bar. I don't have anything in there. So let me walk over there and get the hardware set up right now. All right, the first
step is to actually move the bar feeder completely out of the way so that you have access
to the feeding tube. And from here, there's
just some spin aligners. Now you put in this default
larger spindle liner, that goes in, and then
that serves as an adapter for the smaller one, so here's
my one inch spindle liner, and so you have a liner in a
liner in the machine drop tube, and then you have this. It just goes on the end,
and it has a large spring. That's it. So you need spindle liners
because you don't want that bar whipping in the bore. So once I do that, pull it back. Gas springs slow it to a stop. Really nice touch. Now we need to push that. You have two push rods,
I believe they're called. This is about three-eighths
and this is three-quarter. So since we're using one inch material, I will use the three quarter inch push rod as a bushing here. Snap that in and then
on the tail end here. So that's appropriately loaded, let me grab the material And I'll just put two bars. Again, cut to 48 inches. They want it as close as
possible to the bulkhead, just some consistent length. But honestly, if they're loaded
a little bit left or right, it's not a big deal. Ideally this stays
closed during production. You load bars from the backside just to keep the machine running. So that's all we need to do for now. Let me go back to the machine. It asks us to step through
some things conversationally including adjusting the height of this, and yeah, let's just walk through it. Okay, so it is asking us step one, load and measure the bar by pressing F2. We do that, machine powers up. Okay, that's loaded, so now it's asking us to adjust the transfer tray height. Let's step back over and do that. (upbeat rock music) Okay, so we did that. Step three, F3 to advance the bar. I see the bar loading. (lathe whirs mechanically) Okay, now it's asking us
to jog the bar into place. So we do that by entering handle jog, which it tells us to do, open the chuck and jog it forward. Now, the bar needs to be flush with the face of the chuck, usually takes a couple
of times to do this. Perfect. And now, once we've done that, we hit F4 to set the reference position, meaning that's the bar in line
with the face of the collet is essentially a bar feeder Z0. So we're gonna do that, and it says, "Would you like to advance the bar to the initial length of
two-and-a-half inches?" Simply hit Y for yes,
starts coming out, clamps, resets it, setup completed. So it's that easy. Now, once I have my program running, it's just gonna continue to run, run, run, always advancing to two-and-a-half inches. It parts it, advances it
700 thousandths, continues. When it has less than an
inch-and-a-half clamped in the chuck, it's going to
spit it out, load a new bar. Pretty straightforward. So the bar feeder has been
programmed, we've loaded tools, I've proofed out the program,
let's make some chips. (upbeat music) So what are my final thoughts
after one year of owning it? Well, I can happily say
that we are all very pleased and satisfied with this machine. So, it was initially purchased
to do higher quantity runs, just for certain times of the year so that we would take one
month and run one component so we had a year's worth of inventory. It also was purchased with the thought that maybe we don't put the
critical tolerance parts on this and just run the
standard plus or minus five thou, and then just, just run that through bar and also take some of the
burden off of our mills. And we've been doing lots
of three axis milling. And so that's the purpose
that we purchased it for, and I'm here to say that
it's been fantastic. I really like it. It's not without some hiccups, though. For example, the bar feeder had some little, little bugs in it. The Haas factory was quick to fix it. We had some spindle things, turned out it was a
programming issue on our side because we were approaching
it with the mentality that it read the exact same G
code and M code from a mill. There are some things
that you had to break up. I'm not gonna get into the nuances of that because, quite frankly,
I don't understand them all. I just know that we
just needed to break up certain longer strings of G codes. We know that you can't
put multiple M codes on a line in a mill. The lathe, from what I understand, is some G codes aren't
compatible on the same line. So it's little things that
we just had to get used to. One of the things that I
really liked is the familiarity of the Haas control and
how easy of a transition it was going from the mill to the lathe. Now, I'll also say that the bar feeder was a really easy integration, as you saw. One control, one manufacturer. Communication is just seamless. The only issues that we
had was kind of like the, you have to change the pitch of the ramp because sometimes a heavy bar coming down a steep ramp will pop up the next bar. It's all these little things
that you just get used to with any brand or any model of machine. You find out how it works,
how all the quirks it has, and you record that and you
make adjustments accordingly. So a few things that came with the machine that I initially liked, but in retrospect, I'm not
sure it was totally worth it. The auto door, kind of not used at all. Why? Because we do long run
productions on this, so the door is closed all the time. Now on the flip side, usually I buy mist collectors
for all my machines. I'm probably not gonna do that on this one because again, the door
stays closed all the time. We don't want that air flow
further evaporating the coolant or pulling out any mist
from the machining enclosure because we're just gonna
get rid of coolant that way. Some of our machines burn like 10, sometimes up to 20
gallons a day of coolant when we're taking hot
cuts and it's a hot day. So with this machine, no mist extraction, keeping the door closed, it's great. It works perfectly. We really like it. Now, a common question I get
is does it hold tolerances? Now I did another video
called Haas versus Doosan where we talked about the Doosan and Haas and the pros and cons between
just those two brands, namely because we own Doosan lathes and this is our first Haas lathe. And in the next Pierson Workholding Q&A, we are going to go in depth now that we have a true
apples to apples comparison of the Haas versus Doosan lathes, so watch, look for the description below. That's where we're gonna
put it, or the comments. But until then, I'll tell you that this machine was surprisingly, like, I say surprisingly because I didn't, I just, that it's gonna
be a general purpose, mid-range tolerance machine. I was happily surprised
that this machine will hold plus or minus one thou out of the box. Now that was surprising to me
because it is a big machine. There's lots of casting,
moving parts, all those, the more mass you have, the more distance between components, the more thermal variations you'll see. So, we would come in
on a cold morning, now, keep in mind, we're in
Southern California, so we don't have large
temperature fluctuations. We never get below freezing here. And even if we did, like
a day in the thirties in middle of winter, inside it's probably
gonna get around maybe 55, 50 to 60 degrees, that's normal. On a hot summer day, we'll kick on the AC, and the most amount of, I guess the highest heat that we'll see around here is in the low eighties. And so we have a fairly
narrow thermal window, but I gotta tell you, I
was so happily impressed that we would see sub one
thou movement on parts. Now, the other thing that
we learned just recently when a technician was
coming out, he said that, well, he was here in the
morning and my lathe operator, Chris was chasing the first
40, probably 40 minutes. That's where you see the most
amount of thermal variation. So a part may be off by a thou, and then the next part just
a few tenths and it creeps up and he said, "Oh, you should
use thermal compensation." And I had never heard of it. Chris had never heard of it. And so in the Haas
control, what you do is, from the day before, when
we are machining parts and they are right at zero,
you come in the next morning and then you take a measurement and say it's off, let's give it an exaggerated delta of maybe two thousandths off. The first part is 2 thou under side. What you do is you plug
into the control, the axis, and like, for example, if it's the X axis that's
two thou out of tolerance, you say two thou. Chris knows that within
the first 45 minutes to 60 minutes, it gets right back on zero. So you just tell it thermally
compensate in a linear, a linear graph, in a linear way, I don't know how to even say that, but go from two thou,
and within 60 minutes, incrementally change the
position of your cutting tool back to zero over one hour. And so this allowed us to come in and when we turn on the machine, it says, "Would you like to
apply thermal compensation?" Yes, we would. The first part would come out. It would be pretty close, tenths off, and over the next 60 minutes or whatever time we put in there, it would thermally compensate to keep those initial parts within spec. So this did two things. Number one, we're not
scrapping a bunch of parts. Some shops scrap the first 30, 40 minutes of obviously a low dollar part. They just throw 'em away,
and we don't do that. We have actual usable
parts right off the bat. Second thing it does is
it causes my guy, Chris, to not have to stand here and after each part, change offsets. So a lean win in my book. So what about some cons? Are there things that bug us? Yeah, like quite frankly, I
don't like the parts catcher. It's not as gentle on parts. I'm gonna talk about that in
the Pierson Workholding Q&A, where we take these two machines, this and the Doosan and go head-to-head. But I don't like how basic it is. We've had to pad and
line our shoot at times when we have parts that do
have critical surface finishes. We're running parts right now that we don't want them
colliding into each other and so we're having to
essentially tend it. I know there's different
products out there, like a Royal Rota-Rack. That's something I might add to this that takes parts off as an accumulator. But overall, the question is,
am I happy with this purchase? Would I keep the machine? Would I buy it again? The answer is yes. I absolutely would buy
one of these machines. It's a loud machine. We don't like how loud it is. Haas has been really receptive
to the things we don't like. Hopefully that benefits any of you who are considering Haas lathes, that they will roll out that feedback that we gave to the factory
and make a better product. That's all we can ask for. Overall, yeah. This is a, especially the the ST-30Y, is just a production beast where we can load up
bars in the bar feeder, confidently walk away,
and we have good parts. That's why we bought it. Definitely buy it again. So those are my thoughts. If you're interested in this, I'll put a card right here to
my first Haas versus Doosan. Make sure you subscribe
so that you can catch the next Haas versus Doosan
head-to-head comparison. And until next time, go
innovate your production. (upbeat rock music)
