Soccer tungsten carbide inserts in the world

Soccer become a much-loved sport long before it achieved popularity the United States. In the mid-19th century, soccer was invented in England as we know it today. But the roots of the sport might have been casted down centuries before. In 12th -century England, people played a similar game by kicking a ball around on meadows and fields.

Bringing soccer to America

Colonists from Jamestown settlements started spreading their love for the early version of the game throughout the rest of the territory. But it wasn't after the Civil War that soccer gained popularity in colleges. Playing a game between schools was chaotic, as each one had their own rules! So, you might have Princeton playing with 25 men on the field versus another team with fewer players!

Founding FIFA

As you can see from the American confusion around these rules, there was a lack of common rules. That's why FIFA was created in Europe in 1904. They laid out the rules for the game and organized international competitions. However, in the early 20th -century, FIFA refused the United States's initiative to join. Maybe it's from here that the big split between soccer and other "more American" sports comes from!

Rising popularity

When immigrants got to the shores of the United States coming from Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, they brought along their love of soccer. Children and adults alike were used to playing soccer in the streets with friends back in their home countries. When they got to America to work in manual industries, they didn't just drop this habit! In fact, the nation started paying more attention (and liking!) soccer. In 1921, the first-ever American professional soccer league was founded and named American Soccer League (ASL). As more enthusiasm grew over the ensuing years, more people enrolled in teams and fought to be crowned champions year in and out. Did you know that the United States finished third in the inaugural World Cup in Montevideo, Uruguay?

Where did all that SNMG Insert love go?

But if soccer was once so loved, why is it that nowadays it's not the top sport in the United States? Unfortunately, in 1931 with the Great Depression and thanks to a "civil war" inside the American Soccer League, the organization collapsed. With time, enthusiasm and excitement faded and other sports (such as basketball, football and baseball) filled the void left by soccer in people's hearts.

What now?

Don't be too sad that soccer was sort of wiped off the map in the 20th century. Luckily, the sport is making a comeback. The United States national team is drawing in more talents to dazzle crowds at home and abroad at international competitions. Maybe, in a few decades, the glory of soccer will be restored in the United States!

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There are surprisingly few fundamental differences between a large-format machine tool versus a typical job-shop machine tool. The end goal of a 164-foot-long Waldrich Coburg PowerTec bridge mill, for example, is the same as that of a traditional 10-foot VMC. It’s just that one of them is capable of machining nuclear waste containment vessels, and the other is not.

Is it just our American appetite for ALL-THINGS-BIG that fuels our fascination with giant machine tools? This article will argue that the answer is no — that there are other differences that we appreciate on an intuitive level, even if they are rarely talked about explicitly.

So let’s get explicit. Let’s dig into a fact of life for giant machine tool OEMs — a logistical skill set that is almost exclusive to them.

That skill set is transport, as in: How do you move a machine tool the size of a house from one location to another?

To answer that question, we turned to Waldrich Coburg, a company headquartered in Coburg, Germany, (but with expansive North American operations based in Erie, Pennsylvania) that has long been known for its manufacture of machine tools capable of producing the largest parts imaginable for the power, defense and construction industries.

Those swimming-pool-sized bucket shovels deep hole drilling inserts attached to 10-story hydraulic mining excavators? Waldrich Coburg machine tools produce parts like that.

“It's a niche market,” says Lee Gehrlein, VP of sales in North America. “It's not a commodity machine tool market. These are project machines that are typically customized around a very specific application.” Gehrlein says that, generally speaking, the business is composed of five segments: Newly built customized project machine tools; machine tool retrofitting; machine tool parts and service; specialty design spindles and spindle rebuilds; and finally what Gehrlein calls an “extensive history in machine tool relocation and reconfiguring.”

Jason Grinarml, customer service manager, adds that the company’s North American operations include a full suite of personnel BTA deep hole drilling inserts for administration, application engineering, project management, sales and specialists that handle spindle repair and full spindle rebuilds. Grinarml says that most, if not all, of these departments will be put to task during a typical relocation operation.

“Most of our most challenging transport situations don’t involve relocating a machine from an existing facility to a new one,” he says, “but are instead customers that bought a used piece of equipment.” It is not uncommon that these used machines — machines that are intended to last a lifetime — need to be retrofitted with new controllers or spindle units, then moved to a storage facility while the customer works on the foundation. (More on that in a minute.)

In most cases, Grinarml says, the existing customer — the seller of the machine tool — does not want the machine sitting around for six months while the purchaser constructs a new building or a new foundation. This means that the first job for Waldrich Coburg becomes disassembly and preparation for long-term storage. “Most of the time, before we remove the machine, we will do geometric checks on the equipment,” he says. “This is so we can certify that when we install the machine it will either meet or exceed those geometric conditions.”

Waldrich Coburg technicians arrive on site with 20-foot shipping containers that serve as mobile workshops. They contain all rigging equipment and measuring devices that will perform everything from laser positioning checks to geometric checks using large straight edges, as well as checks for planar alignments of heads and spindle C-axis conditions.

When these checks are complete, it is time to take the machine apart and prepare it for transport. “It’s quite the process,” Grinarml jokes.

It begins with a lead technician who will head up the entire disassembly, reassembly and installation process, and remain on site for the duration. Mechanical engineers and machine technicians disassemble the unit and begin the methodical process of moving its parts onto specially built pallets and into custom storage containers. In most cases, any customer that owns a Waldrich Coburg machine is prepared to handle large parts and can provide an overhead crane to lift the cross rails and other large components. Otherwise, the company brings its own mobile overhead cranes to assist.

As you might guess, lifting a large-format milling head and placing it onto a cross rail isn’t simply a matter of installing a couple of eye-bolts and hoisting it. The company installs specialized fixtures to not only help balance the weight, but also ensure that the guideways will be in the right orientation to match up to the crossrail. These fixtures must be shipped ahead of time to the customer.

Once the machine tool is disassembled and ready to ship, an entirely new adventure begins. These machine tools can weigh up in excess of 750,000 kilograms — 1.65 million pounds — and those with large turntables result in over-width restrictions for travel on American highways.

Much like the situation with overhead cranes, many customers that own large-format machine tools already use their own logistics companies to arrange shipping. If not, Waldrich Coburg will make the arrangements. This typically means scheduling nighttime transportation to avoid road closures or weighing the option of shipping on barges rather than across solid ground.

At the end of shipping, we arrive at storage — an equally daunting logistical consideration. Since most companies have not prepared the necessary foundation for a large-format machine at the time of purchase, Waldrich Coburg provides the specs and blueprints that the purchasing company will take to an engineering company. This company will check soil conditions and determine how much concrete will be required to fill the pit. The answer to that question depends on what lies beneath the surface, which can be anything from bedrock (if you are lucky) to clay to loamy or sandy soil. In one case, the customer began digging its first trench and struck oil — not the “Eureka! Texas-tea!” variety but a contamination from a leak that had been saturating the ground for months or years. The customer had to pump the oil out of the ground until the EPA determined the site to be clean.

In other cases, pilings will need to be driven into bedrock 30 feet below the surface before being filled with concrete. These are extreme examples, of course, but even typical circumstances often require long-term storage solutions that Waldrich Coburn will help resolve. 

The biggest hazard involved with long-term storage is rust. Prior to shipping, the machine tool components are wrapped and coated with a product called Cosmoline, a thick, waxy, oil-based material that hardens over time and inhibits corrosion. But as Lee Gehrlein points out, several variables can affect the success of those efforts against Mother Nature.

“We take every effort to wrap the equipment, package it, coat it and make sure that rust doesn't form over time,” he says. “But if you are storing the equipment outside, for example, or the logistics company poked a hole in the side of the packaging, that can present a problem.” Non-climate-controlled environments result in heating and cooling that allows the formation of condensation inside the machine, which is why every possible surface is coated with Cosmoline before storage.

Once the customer’s foundation is complete and the machine is brought on site, installation is headed up by one of Waldrich Coburn’s lead technicians, who will remain to oversee the entire process. It is during this time that the 20-foot shipping containers that serve as mobile workshops are again put to use. These containers hold all of the rigging and measuring equipment required to ensure that the machine is installed precisely to Earth level.

The company’s machine technicians and application engineers begin by installing the cast iron components, followed by the installation of piping, chip conveyors and the enclosure. Finally, the company’s electrical engineers begin to rewire all components.

When everything is in place, a machine technician starts the machine, tests all functionality (including tool changers and head changers) and begins performing test cuts and probing cycles.

Now begins the final step of operator training, provided by a Waldrich Coburg applications engineer. During this process, the customer’s support is critical. “Having that customer’s support during this phase does a couple things,” Grinarml says. “It's saving them money on labor, but it's also getting their maintenance people familiar with this piece of equipment. And this is important because this machine will be expected to run consistently for the next 20 to 40 years. It also gives the customer experience directly from us on how the machine was actually built.”

By the time all is said and done, the entire process can last from one to three years, Gehrlein says. On the short end, a two-year installation might involve a company that only needs to move the machine tool from one location at their facility to another. At the other end of the spectrum is a greenfield situation where the customer is purchasing, shipping and installing a used piece of equipment in an entirely new location. This involves a justification phase, during which the customer considers all of the factors outlined in this article.

This initial justification phase is critical, Gehrlein says. “If they are looking at a used machine tool, they are asking several questions. What type of condition is it in? Can we reconfigure it to fit our needs? Can we retrofit it to current standards? What type of soil do we have? How much will the foundation cost? Because the machine tools that we're selling are designed to last 50 plus years. We recently had a machine tool that had been installed for 45 years that we just did a complete inspection and rebuilt the spindle unit, and it may well last another 50 years.”

“It’s that fact,” Grinarml jokes, “that presents a difficult situation as a sales guy.”

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There is a gap between cutting tool knowledge and the built-in capabilities of even the most advanced CAM systems. The reason for this is simple: The cutting tool makers know the most about the nuances of tool performance. They know more about this than both machine tool suppliers and the developers of software that programs these machines. Forward-moving CAM systems do incorporate new toolpath strategies that have been proven effective. However, as they do this, cutting tool companies continue to search out even more effective strategies for specific machining challenges. This is what progress looks like. As a result, the range of machining strategies that a CAM system can apply automatically is just one aspect of what makes a CAM system valuable. In certain applications involving high-value parts, another valuable aspect of the CAM system is the amount of freedom it offers for departing from these built-in routines.

Tom Funke is a senior CAM programmer for the Aerospace Application Center with Sandvik Coromant. He sees NX CAM from Siemens PLM Software as one example of a CAM system offering this sort of freedom. In fact, enough of the company’s aerospace engine-related customers use this software that the cutting tool maker offers a class—taught by Mr. Funke—which details ways to use NX version 6 to optimize tool performance in difficult-to-machine materials. The techniques often involve toolpath strategies that are not necessarily possible to apply using only automatic toolpath routines in CAM.

The contents of this class (and other classes like it that will apply to other CAM systems) certainly do not apply to every part, Mr. Funke says. Some of the recommended strategies demand considerable programming time, and the added expense probably could not be justified for a high-value part machined just one time. But in cases where high-value parts are machined in production quantities, the chance to realize greater tool life or productivity might deliver considerable savings. This is particularly true of aerospace machining, in which workpieces have high price tags and an NC program might stay in use for years. In these cases, adding several hours to programming time represents a practically inconsequential price to pay for better performance.

Here, then, are some of the strategies Sandvik Coromant recommends for these types of parts. The course Mr. Funke teaches takes two days, so these examples offer only a taste. Yet these examples also include some of the more broadly useful recommendations, including a tip on how the milling tool ought to enter the workpiece.

All specific application instructions here are given in the context of NX 6. However, experienced programmers using other systems might also be able to see how to generate the same sorts of cost-saving moves within the CAM environments that they themselves know best.

1. Roll In

This first recommendation for improving cutting tool performance via the tool path describes a very simple idea. However, few if any CAM ONHU Insert systems offer an automatic way to apply it, says Mr. Funke. He explains that carbide milling cutters perform best when the chip thickness proceeds from thick to thin as the cutting edge moves. That way, cutting force is released gradually instead of suddenly. This is the reason to favor climb milling over conventional milling. For this same reason, the tool should not proceed into the material in a straight line. It should “roll” into the cut instead.

In other words, the tool should follow an arc into the material. It should pivot around a point on the circle of the tool circumference, so that the centerline of the tool proceeds through a curve that has the same clockwise direction as the tool’s rotation. Figure 1 shows this.

Entering the material this way keeps chip thickness thin at the end of SPMT Insert every cutting edge pass, from the very outset of the engagement with the material.

Does taking this extra measure really matter? After all, climb milling will take care of the thick-to-thin requirement for all the rest of the cut. How much impact can the brief duration of entry actually have?

Considerable impact, Mr. Funke says. Most of the strain on a tool is not the result of gradual wear, but instead a result of those moments in the cut where the load on the tool dramatically drops off. Sandvik Coromant monitored carbide inserts in a test milling Inconel 718, where the only difference from cut to cut was whether the tool rolled in or entered the material in a straight line. The tool that was allowed to roll in showed 8 times greater tool life (see photos).

Rolling in effectively in this way requires the correct direction. Thick-to-thin chips entail climb milling, but also require a “roll” direction that is the same as that of the tool rotation. Mr. Funke says one way to define this arc in NX is to create a boundary, using “Arc–Parallel to Tool Axis” in the Non-Cutting Moves window.

2. Ramp Down

Milling away a volume of material in sequential Z-level layers also favors a strategy for keeping the tool engaged. This is true of milling not only down through the layers of a pocket, but also down through the layers surrounding a positive feature. The default programming strategy for machining these layers often has the tool machine a layer complete, retreat from the cut, machine another layer, retreat, and so on. The disengagement can be detrimental to tool life.

A potentially better strategy is to manually create a tool path that ramps down to the next layer at the end of each set of Z-level passes. If the geometry of the feature permits it, this ramp could be a long, straight descent. Each new ramp down could then lie directly underneath the preceding ramp down, so that the depth of cut remains the same as the tool goes down from one layer to the next. Or, for machined areas that are small relative to the size of the tool, something like Figure 2 is possible—a tool path that ramps down continuously.

3. Spiral Out

Inside of pockets, Mr. Funke says a way to avoid the tool wear associated with changing directions at corners is to confine most of the milling to a continuous circular path. This can allow the tool to feed considerably faster and/or last much longer. Sandvik Coromant calls this approach “spiral morphing,” in which the tool path follows a growing circle until it reaches far enough out that it finally has to give way to the pocket’s shape, as seen in Figure 3.

In NX, similar to the “roll in” recommendation above, a boundary can be created to drive the tool path in this shape. The “Helix” command can be used to create and define the spiral.

4. Slice Corners

The spiral-morph routine cited above might use a large tool that leaves stock behind in the corners of the pocket. This is stock that a much smaller tool will have to remove. Similarly, plunge roughing might also leave material behind in the corners of a pocket. With pockets, the corners often present the real challenge.

To machine these corners with a small tool, the straightforward and typical approach is to feed into each corner, make a sharp turn and feed out. This approach demands slow cutting. In addition, it might cost considerable tool life because the increase and release of the load subjects the tool to strain.

The alternative Sandvik Coromant recommends is “corner slicing,” in which a succession of toolpath slices ensures a consistent radial depth of cut within the material. The technique is illustrated in Figure 4.

Each slice is a different tool move that is defined separately. To implement corner slicing moves in NX, Mr. Funke recommends using the “Fixed Contour” operation and creating boundaries using the “Fillet” command.

5. Turn Left then Right

Just like milling tools, turning tools also suffer strain when the load on the tool is suddenly relaxed. Using round turning inserts presents particular opportunities for keeping the cutter continuously engaged.

Specifically, for turned features requiring machining at subsequent layers, Sandvik Coromant recommends an approach it calls “trochoidal turning.” This approach differs from other “trochoidal” machining tool paths in a significant way. Rather than repeating the same arcing tool path ever farther into the part, trochoidal turning involves changing the cutting direction at the end of every pass. That is, the round insert traces the shape of the feature toward the left, then goes deeper to trace the shape of the feature toward the right, and so on until the feature is finished—as shown in Figure 5. By going back and forth, the insert lasts longer because it never leaves the material, causing the load on the tool to remain more level.

This is another technique that can involve several programming steps per feature. Mr. Funke says NX’s Teach Mode offers one way to program the tool path. First, the geometry of the part feature is captured in Modeling Mode, with “Follow Curve Motion” in Teach Mode used to match the tool path to this geometry. The tool path is then applied at successive depths, one pass at a time. To ensure that each new pass changes direction, the programmer changes “Material Side” between left and right at the end of every pass.

6. Drive by the Edge

In some cases, the selection of custom toolpath techniques not only allows the tool to perform more effectively, but also permits an altogether better choice of the cutting tool itself. Mr. Funke says something like this is possible in machining the OD surfaces of turbine engine casings.

Accurately removing material around the curvature of these cylindrical or conic surfaces often calls for five-axis milling with relatively small-diameter tools. Given the combination of superalloy material and the small tools usually used in this application, cycle times can be long indeed. The slow passes with small tools can at best be like nibbling away the large-diameter parts.

Mr. Funke says the alternative frequently impresses the makers of these parts when they use it for the first time. Processes for milling these parts can actually employ much larger tools than these shops typically use. The key is to use cutters with round inserts for edge strength. The finish and accuracy of the conic or cylindrical surface is then ensured in two ways: (1) by driving the tool according to the leading edge of this insert, where the round insert actually meets the round workpiece, and (2) by carefully managing cusp heights between adjacent passes with the large-diameter tool.

The cusp height between adjacent passes on casing ODs can be calculated through trigonometry. Because of the way the cut involves intersecting circles—the round tool meeting the round part at an offset distance—the calculation is complex. Sandvik Coromant has developed a calculator to help customers with this very application. However, because the cusp height can be known precisely, the stepover increment can be chosen to hold the cusp to a value smaller than the needed surface finish of the part. Thus, the high-productivity milling with the large-diameter tool can be used not just for roughing, but also to achieve the final surface.

One of the key variables is where the centerline of the cutting tool actually lies. As Figure 6 illustrates, the finish and flatness of the milled OD surface actually require cutting to occur just inside the curvature of the cutting insert. The cutting tool company’s calculator specifies this necessary tool offset distance as well. Mr. Funke says the CAM software’s automatic positioning of the tool will not provide for this cutting. Instead, the simple solution is to specify a different (fictitious) radius for the insert. Offsetting for this radius, the CAM software will place the tool in the correct position.
 

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