I went to the RapidChange website and used the contact form to request help with the loading issue.
Don called me pretty quickly after that (which I wasn’t expecting at all on Memorial Day) and helped me work through it.
Here are the tweaks that we did to get everything working:
- A slight change to the pocket spacing because Pocket 1 was working better than the others down the line. I don’t recommend changing this except at the direction of Don.
- Increased the load RPM’s to increase the inertia when tightening the collet nut to 2000. Don may be changing his default setting for the 1.5Kw spindles because they don’t have quite the oompf of his 2.2Kw spindle.
- I dressed the lead in threads on both the spindle and the collet nuts with some emory cloth to make sure that there weren’t any burrs that could be causing the hang ups.
- I changed the slot positions in the Tool Changer -Type 2 settings to all be the same as the Tool Setter instead of Pocket 1 to save some extraneous movement on tool changes.
- I reduced the spin-up and spin-down times in the Spindle settings so the process would go a little faster.
Once these changes were made, I was able to successfully load each of the tool pockets individually and when running the Tool Change Test program to cycle through all 4.
I think this may have the issue resolved but will need to run a few jobs before I am confident in it.
Thanks to Don for going out of his way to work through this with me.
Also, for reference, here’s a picture of my spindle in the Z-slider…I could raise it a bit but not a lot before I would run out of room for the dust shoe.
Thanks again TMToronto for putting so much thought into this problem. I appreciate your help!
Craig