So over the years, I've put out lots of videos about all of our machines,
but I still keep getting questions about our Doosan lathes.
So in this video, I'm going to summarize each one of my experiences
with these lathes over the years.
Cover the good bad in the maintenance issues that sometimes turned ugly.
Let's get started.
So this is the first lathe that I purchased.
It's my December 2014 purchase.
I had had lathe parts made for me for years
and then I would add the milled portion later.
But when I hired my first rock star, he had an understanding of the
Fanuc control.
So it is natural that we went with a Fanuc control on a lathe
he had worked on Doosans, he really liked them He actually went back
to when they were called Daewoo and he worked on Daewoo Puma, to be exact.
So this is like the entry level lathe that we started with
that I would recommend sort of I'll get to why and why not in a minute.
But this machine to this day really holds great tolerances.
Of course, we care for things really well, but it is really basic.
So the chuck is a an eight inch chuck.
It has a small turret.
It doesn't have live tooling. It doesn't have a Y.
It has a physical tail stock that you move into place
that has a hydraulic actuator so that you can turn longer parts.
I think we've used it once successfully, but once.
But as you can see, it's small.
It's a nice form factor.
It's an easy entry into CNC turning.
But as I've said in other videos, I would not buy this machine again,
not because of anything about this machine, but the construction
of it, meaning that it is just a two axis lathe.
You have Z and you have X.
The goal for lathes that we have in this shop is one-and-done.
So that means a sub spindle.
Also you do OP one, it comes, grabs it, picks it off, opt to
and then you have whether it's live tooling
or y axis, you definitely want those combinations to go together.
You can have finished parts coming off of your lathe,
for example, with this part here.
When I first started selling our pallet system
without a blade, we would send this part out for turning,
but it would come back with no perimeter or face holes.
So then it would come back.
We would put it in the mill and then we put it on a rotary indexer
when we brought it in-house.
And then we were doing OP-1
all of OP-1 , then flipping it over, doing a setup, change
all of Op-2 then it would go to a mill two at a time in a vise
and then one at a time in a 5C Rotary indexer
that used an expanding callit lots of hand-holding.
Over the years, we've gotten better at making this part.
Let me show you the next machine that I purchased
a few years later that made this almost done.
Let's head over.
Okay, so this was the next machine that I bought two years later, 2016.
It's a Doosan Lynx
220LSY live tooling sub spindle.
I don't think the L stands for life, but subs, spindle and Y travels.
This was a game changer for us.
This is when I realized, oh, the goal of turning is to have complete parts.
Many years later we added the Iemca bar feeder
because then it could run totally unattended instead of bar pulling
and then stopping, waiting for an operator to put another piece of material
in the side.
Now we can run overnight unattended.
That's a game changer for us.
So what's unique about live tool sub spindle
lathes is and Y travels is
your parts can now well specifically this part can be turned on the front.
You can have what we did is we have a custom
form drill come in and do these face holes.
I'm not sure if we did that immediately, but it's the concept that matters right?
Then if you had a live tool, you could come in and do that
all the machining and because it moves in Z, X and Y, we could
interpolate these holes because it does have an interpolated feature,
then the sub spindle can come in and pick up on this.
Now that's where it gets tricky with sub spindles.
This had a small it was an odd 100 millimeter chuck, which isn't common.
It didn't fit any of the standards, but
it was 100 millimeter and we immediately took that off.
In fact, both sides of the spindles had Chucks on it.
Day one, those immediately came off wrapped in VCI.
Put in a drawer and have never been put back on,
and we went with the royal quick Grip system on on the left
or main in a5c court on the right.
So with the five C call it with a one inch max, we could come in,
grab this feature and then turn the backside.
So facing you it would finish and we could get almost finished parts.
Now this part is a very tough material, so it's hardened
to, I want to say
in the fifties, Rockwell C I can't quite remember.
But what, what one thing to keep in mind
is that when we were making this and we were trying to machine this,
these live tools are not a replacement for a mill.
Even my first machine, which was a Haas minimill will outperform
the live tools on these types of machines.
They outperform in accuracy, in dependability,
in horsepower and the all important in finish.
These are gear driven, they're noisy, they get hot.
In fact, we had to send several of these angled drive
tool holders in to get serviced.
Yeah, just because they would just go bad from the heat.
You cannot run them dry.
You have to run coolant through them, not just through surface
finish, but to cool the actual driven tool holder.
So really going from the to 20 L, which is a basic 2 access lathe
to a multi axis lathe with live tooling was a game changer
after that light bulb was shined on how we produce these parts.
That's when it really got me thinking about really powerful, driven tools.
I looked around, I landed on the next machine.
Let's talk about that one.
Okay.
Doosan Puma MX2100 ST
If you have watched the channel before,
I've done two videos about this machine, so I'll keep my comments short.
But the big thing that I was looking for with this machine is again
a main and a sub is not have a sub, it's a left and a right.
They're both two identical 30 horsepower spindles, so a lot of cutting power.
Then we have a lower turret that has live tooling.
It doesn't have Y travels.
That's fine because the milling that you would normally do with a live
tool is handled by the upper milling head that articulates.
I don't remember the degrees, but now we're using actual milling tools
in a Capto C6 super rigid body holder
and we're drilling holes, we're transferring,
we are counter boring, we're coming in, we're
pre drilling, we're channel free, we're back boring, all those things.
And it has a belt style tool changer in the back With this.
There are no limits on power, on capacity, on the ability
to put in some really trick features into your part.
It is a very expensive machine.
You could probably buy 3 220L
SYs with the price with the money that would go towards this.
But as far as capacity, this is a production beast, so
we opted to not bar load it for now
because a lot of the work we're going to do is larger parts
where we want to apply a lot more horsepower to it.
So we have considered deploying a robot to auto load this
and then it would machine this side, do all the milling features, come off
and do the back side, milling features, and then it captures it sends it
a conveyor out the side of the machine
and on the right hand side of the machine finished parts come out.
So again, the goal of these types of lathes is to produce parts
as if you are printing money just without the jail sentence.
The next chronological machine I got may seem like a step backwards,
but it fit a gap in our company's story of how we produce parts like this.
Let's head over and take a look at that one.
As the company grew, we bought machines that would require different processes
to happen and we recognized that there was a gap and not by our fault,
but because sales were increasing, volumes were going up
and we just had our Doosan Lynx 220 small live tool machine
never stopping, it
was always tied up and we needed to upgrade to
but not as big as the MX but a little bit bigger than the 220.
So that's where the Doosan Puma 2600SY II came into play.
Now if you want to learn more about this machine, we actually did another video
about maybe a year ago, so we'll add a card up in the corner here
so you can find out, put a link down to the description.
So this has a very large I mean, for us, it's a three inch bar capacity.
We could pull bigger diameter things instead of sawing them off
like the break cover part that I just showed.
That's a three inch piece of material.
Those were sawed and then slugged in the lathe.
Let's stop sawing. That is over processing.
That's one of the lean wastes that we try and eliminate it around here.
So now we bar pool three inch through and then pre machine
those, they go to heat treat, then they're finished in the Puma MX.
So the puma line, especially this one, it's a boxway.
That's what makes it distinctive from the Lynx line.
It is just like the, the diesel powered version
of like the Ford F-150.
It is the next step up.
Everything is bigger. Everything is more rigid.
It's the next, I feel like this is like the
the upper level of what Doosan offers.
So when it comes to live tooling, this has what's called BMT 65.
Our Lynx had BMT 45.
Our Puma had BMT 55.
So it's a bummer that we don't have standardized
tooling blocks, but it's fine.
We work around it.
I love this machine.
I think it's worth every penny.
I love the BMT 65 because it has lots of spacing.
There's no
like crash issues.
It just gets a little nerve racking when you're doing a setup and you're
trying to avoid paneling, sheet metal, not bumping tools.
The benefits of a larger turret is that you get
those that that clearance that just leads
to a more peaceful mindset as you set stuff up.
And when you're not walking on eggshells during a setup,
you just feel more confident you can get to finished parts quicker.
So one of the
things that we shifted over to this machine was what's called our lock ring.
Now, these, if you're familiar with our products,
go into the bottom of our aluminum pallets
and they are what our ball actuated
locking mechanism expands into you to pull our pallets flat.
We make thousands and thousands and thousands of these.
Obviously, it's a popular product line
demand just was exceeding our Lynx.
That's why we started day one.
With bar feeding this because we don't want to run into capacity issues
anymore, but the Puma line with the boxway construction really rock solid machine.
I think if you were on the fence about this
and the Lynx, oh man, they are.
They're so close in their ability to produce parts.
I would lean probably towards the puma, although it's
probably got maybe a 30% premium on the cost
in performance alone and clearance and a bigger, more rigid machine.
You'll earn that back in. Well, I don't know.
That's your opportunity to calculate ROI, but it is worth every penny.
Would I buy a lynx again?
Yeah, because we had a specific
need for that niche machine.
Would I buy a puma again? Definitely.
Now let's talk about maintenance and reliability.
Now, out of these four lathes only one of them has never given us a single problem.
Can you take a guess at which one it is?
Our 220L. I’ve had it since 2014.
Not a single problem.
That's an incredible track record.
Now, one machine has given us lots of problems.
Well, lots of problems in its short life with us.
Four to be specific.
And that is our MX. This would be expected.
This is a two axis machine that's given us no problems.
This is a multi seven, eight, nine axis machine with three individual spindles
for if you consider live tooling and the lower turret
and it's given us lots of problems, it's just more moving parts. Now.
Our local rep Ellison has been great working with us.
Some of the problems surfaced really early on in life,
but a handful of the problems, at least two out of the four
showed up at like month 14, just barely out of the warranty period.
But Ellison was really great to work with.
They gave us excellent phone support at least a couple hours on the phone,
so we were able to diagnose and fix the problem in-house.
I wasn't my guy.
Carlos, chief problem solver here in the company,
was able to do a deep dive and get it back up and running.
So that's good.
So for me, one of the biggest considerations in buying machines
is local support.
Now support, meaning phone support, local parts, availability
and technicians and their free schedules.
So Haas and Doosan or DN Solutions These days has been really good.
So just one more thing to take into consideration.
If you're thinking of getting kind of an off brand or not as popular brand,
trying to save that money, if you don't have good sales support,
you can be down where you will not realize you have a sunk cost
if your machine is down for multiple weeks.
I know one customer in particular had to make his own part
because it was a European brand that they just could not get parts
over to the Americas in time.
They sent him a print,
he made the replacement part and he put his machine back into service.
Like, We don't do that.
There's that cost of ownership.
Cost of maintenance. Just one more thing to consider.
So did I answer all your questions?
If not, drop it in the comments below.
And if you can think of someone that might get value
from this type of video, share it with them and pay it forward.
So until next time, go innovate your production.