Tool Life Expectancy

Tips & Tricks email “Protect your tool” sent out on 13th November 2009 (found here) focused on the monitoring function for Tool Load and the use of the setting 84 Tool Overload Action facility, however for those users with a long running production job, or perhaps those that employ the same tooling for multiple components being able to monitor the Tool Usage can be equally beneficial. 

Most cutting tool suppliers will give an expected ‘life’ for their products or maybe you know from experience that your HSS endmill will do 50 to 60 components before needing a regrind, however knowing this data still requires the operator to manually count how many parts have been done and change the tool at the right time.

Haas software engineers have installed in all Haas controls the facility to count the number of times a tool is called into the spindle and have provided an alarm function for each tool – what does this do? Well it allows the user to specify the maximum number of times a particular tool can be called into the spindle via program, and should the alarm number be reached the machine will automatically generate an alarm notifying the operator of the excessive tool use and stop the machining cycle.

The page is accessed by pressing the CURNT COMDS button and then using the page up or down buttons to cycle through the various pages of data.

The Tool Life page also shows the Feed Time and Total Time which can be used for simply information purposes or through the use of the optional Macro function the user is able to read these figures and calculate tool life via distance travelled and thus use the data available from the cutting tool manufacturer to accurately monitor the tool performance.