Issue:

Hello All, I have been lurking here for a while and have found this site to be a wealth of knowledge. Having said that, I have a machining scenario to throw out for input. I cannot put a picture of the part up, so I will describe it as best I can. I am having problems positioning 2 dowel holes in a aluminum casting. The feature in question is .3135-.3145 diameter, .300 thou deep, with the two dowels having a center distance of 11.481 thousandths. The dowels have a positional tolerance of .001 at MMC. Machine setup is as follows; Okuma MA600HB, about three years old. The part is an aluminum casting, with what I am going to call quite a few features (tapped holes, oil passages, shafting diameters) and is done in 6 setups. I am currently putting the dowel holes in at a .281 diameter, and machining the not so closely postioned features, then putting the part on a dedicated finishing fixture and finish machining all of the close (.002 positional and tighter) features in one setup. As of right now, I am using a .250 dia. endmill to open up the .281 diameter to a .305 diameter and then following it up with a .3136 solid carbide reamer. The reamer is chucked in an ER20 collet chuck, runout is less than .0002 at the tool end, and the hole diameter ends up at .3139 or so. I am feeding both axes into the postions of the dowels from the same direction, and reaming the second dowel right after the first (no toolchanges or pallet indexes). According to the CMM, the parts have up to a .0025 deviation on position. We typically run about 10 parts at a time with this feature and they are all run on the finishing fixture one after another (no other parts in between). Does anybody have any ideas as to what I could be doing wrong? Thoughts?

Answers: 1_ I would open the holes up to .311 with a boring head before reaming so you are reaming way less
material. Have you checked location after milling and before reaming?

2_I either bore the hole on location or plunge with an undersize endmill then ream when faced with a
close positional tolerance. But for your tolerance, I would most likely bore it to size and location. The problem with circular interpolating like you are doing presently is that the hole is neither perfectly round or on location. When you mill a circle you want the endmill to be much smaller than the circle you are milling. I seem to remember seeing some type of formula once upon a time, but my CRS prevents me from getting my hands on it right now.

3_ Is there a reason not to bore directly to size? Why ream? I'd think boring directly to size would give
you results as good as the machine is capable of.

4_ What kinda CMM are you using? When you say .0025 deviation, are you saying the distance in a single direction it's out is .0025, or the True Position reading is .0025 instead of .001? Get a .156 two flute endmill with a .312 length of cut, and interpolate those holes. Unless that machine's been crashed, these are your culprits in order of likelihood(IMO): -Fixture bending the part -Bad alignments in CMM program -Reamer wobbling around (not real likely) If you interpolate those holes, and you still get location problems, you know it's not the reamer. Another plus to interpolating those holes, you can control the size, and open it right up to the dead max, to get the most out of your MMC. 5_ We make transmission covers from Aluminum castings and can hit that positional tolerance without an issue. Predrilling the hole in a previous setup probably isn't helping. Your best bet would be to drill and then ream in the same setup. If you can, approach the hole from the same direction for each hole to eliminate any backlash. 6_ Are you checking the position of the reamed holes while the part is still in the fixture? Potential to distort the part with the fixture.... I would bore to finished on the dowel. Your approach at moving in the same direction is good...would do a linear move (not rapid) to final position, at a relatively low feed rate.. Most machines will do better as to position if running metric..would program in MM and see if the accuracy does not improve.... Cheers Ross 7_ You don't want to interpolate holes with close true position tolerance. Run a endmill or boring head a few thousandth's under and finish ream, or if your machine will tool change and hold size with the boring head, bore them to size. Positive approach is good, use G01 and not too high of a feedrate for at least the last 1/2" of movement. I suspect you have distortion problems from clamping the parts, so your fixturing methods are critical. I used to runs some jet engine gearbox housings and had to hold .001" true position regardless of feature size, so basically the same thing. We had to take the machined part, all except for the close bores and lap the mounting face to make sure it was flat and not distorted, then we used tapped holes in that face to mount it under a plate, using a torque settable screw driver (actually tightening allen bolts) set to give absolutely consistent results part to part and screw to screw, then we ran all the bores, like two pin holes and then three concentric center bores a the same time, all with boring heads. This part was small, maybe six inches across or so.... I'd hate to be in your shoes at almost 11 1/2" apart... I'm not sure I'd trust the CMM at that distance either.

8_ Couple more thoughts... I have tried in the past to open the holes up with an endmill right to size, and I ended up having problems with hole diameter repeatability. Typically, over a run of ten parts, the first two would come out to the same size, and the subsequent parts would require constantly fiddling with the diameter offset and tool re-runs. The reason that I chose the .250 diameter mill was because I was worried about tool deflection, I could try a smaller mill and see if more machine movement would help it. The part is setup on the fixture so that the face that the dowels are normal to is against rest buttons, with toe clamps pushing directly above the rest buttons on a flat machined surface. After I run the endmill to open the holes up, I can take a .0005 co-ax indicator and run it in the diameter that the endmill just cut and get little to no visible runout from where I say that the center of the hole should be. So I tend to think that the mill is straightening the hole and putting it on location. Same goes for the reamer, after it has run I can do the same test and get little to no runout (less than .0002). I am single direction positioning the endmill and reamer at a feed of 25 ipm. The reamer that I am currently using is all of about 4 inches from the gage line to the tip of the reamer. I was kind of going for the reamer acting like a boring bar in that the positioning of the machine and the stiffness of the reamer/toolholder setup "should" straigten out any of the latent positioning error from the core drill/endmill interpolation. Boring bars have been mentioned several times now, does anybody have a recommendation of a good small hole boring to try? I had thought about it but was not coming up with much for a 5/16 hole size. Thanks for all of the thoughts, keep them coming please. 9_ Interpolating small holes with .001TP with .001 bonus with a good machine on a hole that's only 1XD deep is an all day-every day process. Maybe not as good as boring, but easier to setup and maintain. 10_ He doesn't have .001" TP and .001" bonus, he has .001" TP AT Maximum Material Condition. Which is basically .001 TP RFS. I suppose machines today are better than my mid 90's versions I was used to, but we wouldn't have had to good of luck interpolating holes to size for production runs. We used several small Infinity boring heads and solid carbide bars from Circle or Criterion and had good luck holding about .0003"-.0005" tolerance on hole size. For the larger bores we used Criterion tenthset heads or Kaiser. 11_ Use a JIG BORE REAMER you will get the right size hole in the right place... Google it, if you've never heard of them before http://pdf.directindustry.com/pdf/we...34663-_93.html

12_ He doesn't have .001" TP and .001" bonus, he has .001" TP AT Maximum Material Condition. Which

is basically .001 TP RFS. I suppose machines today are better than my mid 90's versions I was used to, but we wouldn't have had to good of luck interpolating holes to size for production runs. We used several small Infinity boring heads and solid carbide bars from Circle or Criterion and had good luck holding about .0003"-.0005" tolerance on hole size. For the larger bores we used Criterion tenthset heads or Kaiser.

Yikes! I saw .001TP and MMC, and assumed he meant : .001 TP RFS is gonna be a real treat regardless of how it's processed. Aluminum will move about .0001 for every inch, every 10 degrees. So with the 11 inch long part, a 5 degree temp swing with .001 TP RFS and you're outa here.

13_ Joe788 has what I meant when I was describing the positional tolerance. Never heard of a jig bore reamer, might look into that as well as I searched thru Criterions website and they have a pretty slick boring setup that goes into an ER collet chuck. I know enough about CMM's to be dangerous, but I will say that we have had problems with the CMM's giving goofy results on occasion. They are older (early 90's?) Sheffields (sp) running a pretty current version of PCDMIS. Problem with the CMM's are that there are only two people in the plant that know how to run them, ones been on the machine for 6 months and the 30 years. It is a little touchy suggesting/asking questions about the measurement methods. 14_ I wouldn't care how touchy they (quality) got. They have a job to do and without repeatable measuring results, you may as well stick your finger up your a** and sing a lullaby. I have to go see what's up in the QI department quite a bit. They usually don't like to see me coming. I would have serious doubts about the accuracy and repeatability of those old CMM's. Has a gauge capability study (R&R) been done on them at this tolerance? (My bet is not.) Remember, you can only machine to what you can reliably, repeatably and accurately measure. 15_ As Tony states, not only do you have to measure it, you have to be able to measure it within 10% of the total tolerance or you can't be confident in your results. That means those CMM's have to be within a tenth or so. It's one thing to say "my machine can hold tenths", but I'd really like to see it done all day long on 100 pcs, or a thousand pieces and not just one lucky shot that happened to be what it was supposed to be. These kind of tolerances are upper stratosphere, super sophisticated machinery and inspection equipment requirements.....

16_ I've done quite a lot of thin wall aluminum castings with tolerances similar to what the OP has. Easy as hell to hit that tolerance, I wouldn't even bore it, N drill and ream. Works like a dream when your customer has no good way to measure it and you're doing the assembly, and they don't care as long as it works. In general I'd say stupid tolerance, though I don't know the application. In general, I don't trust QC people. I may trust them with my life or my dogs, but not necessarily with a pair of calipers. Somebody already said it, but temp can throw you a big curve ball on something that long. Also already been said, flatness and fixturing, that's the first thing I would get after. I can think of about 4000 things that have to do with the machine that may be screwing you up. One thing that has screwed me up before, if the machine is not nuts into square, different tool lengths. If I try to nail something like this nuts, I try and make all my tools the same length. Spot, drill, interpolating endmill and reamer, try to get them all to the same Z offset. More or less will alleviate any Z axis alignment issues, sort of(and it doesn't take much to fuck up your holes). Think about it, if your Z is out say .0001 an inch, you interpolate with an endmill that has a 2" gage length, and it makes a perfect hole. You come back with a stiff carbide reamer that has a 6" gage length, that puts you .0004 off of hole center. There is .0008 or your .001 right there. I'd say that if you are hitting .0025 true position, you're doing pretty damn good. That is literally splitting hairs over a foot in distance, in aluminum. I wouldn't beat myself up, find out why, but unless its your money on the line, don't lose sleep over it, that's pretty good.

Solving the problem

Thanks everybody for the replies and ideas, I think we have found a some of the problem. The fixture that I was using had sliding toe clamps on it, and I think that what may have been happening was the potential was there for the loading operator to slide the clamps into contact with an as cast surface, and the part may have been distorting when the clamps were tightened on the cast surface. The clamps were "supposed" to be slid into position over a machined spotface, but over three shifts and multiple operators, I dont know how often that was happening. Came up with a clamp that cannot be out of position, and it seems to have fixed the problem. Over a ten part run, the worst part that came up had a .0004 deviation (w/o bonus) from nominal. The measurement method is still somewhat suspect, but we are working on that as well.Thanks everybody for the suggestions.