Machining Center Tool Life Management: Make It Or Break It

When doing long runs on your machining center, your approach to tool life management is a “make it or break it” proposition. Yes, tool breakage is a concern, but you should also have a process in place that doesn’t “break” your productivity. Many users rely on the basic procedure of having backup tools on-hand, which can be used as needed. The problem with this approach is that you need to stop the machine to do tool maintenance, so you’re stopping the spindle and ruining productivity. But there’s a way to switch to a new tool while your CNC machine is running, and this is true tool life management. Here I’ll show you two options for using tool life management on your THINC^®-OSP control.

Tool Life Management: Option 1

Caron Engineering, a member of Partners in THINC, offers a powerful application called TMAC (Tool Monitor Adaptive Control). When TMAC is used with Okuma machining centers you can implement a redundant tooling setup where, if one exceeds its life, the parts are removed and the machine automatically picks up a replacement tool. This allows you to go to the magazine while the machine is still running and pull out the used or spent tool, gather data from it, and put it into maintenance.

TMAC gives you the ability to trace the complete life of a particular tool – including throughput, how many parts you’re getting, and machine specifics. If that tool is designated to one machine, you can tell if that CNC machine is having issues, such as the tool wearing quicker than the same tool on another machine. TMAC allows you to do things like tool testing and sample time reduction, providing lots of information that allows you to measure and improve productivity.

Tool Life Management: Option 2

Okuma machining centers come with a control feature called Tool Breakage Detection (shown in the photo above*). This can be found under Tool Length Auto Set or Auto Tool Length and Auto Tool Breakage Detection.

Long Runs and Long Cycle Times

If you’re doing short run parts, these options are not really needed in your shop. But they’re extremely useful for automotive shops doing long runs and aerospace shops dealing with long cycle times. Modern Machine Shop discusses this and many other considerations in their article “The Goal Of A Tool Life Management System,” a good read.

If you’d like to discuss which tool life management system would be best for your appplications, feel free to contact us or your local distributor. We also welcome you to share your thoughts or questions in the Comments below.

Jeb Tyler is Applications Engineer, Okuma America Corporation.

*additional screen shots of the Tool Breakage Detection feature can be seen here.