Wondering if you guys have any advice for setting up a lathe turret with common tools for best combination of clearance. Machine has 10" chuck with 12 position toolchanger. Pretty sure a ID tool will hit chuck when using an adjacent OD tool close to center.
I wish you Good Luck in your endeavor!
In my view most of the MTB-s today design lathes as if this is their first rodeo!
I am OK with them trying to cater to those people who want to turn 16" diameters on an 8" machine, but WTF!! What about those of us who just want a proper clearance around the chuck just so we don't have to constantly remove unused tools or else risk busting them off!
I don't know what machine you're tooling up, but my recent endeavor in finding an 8" machine with 12 station turret having ample elbow room resulted in only one lathe, the Takisawa TCN 2100 L6.
Still nowhere near the clearance I get on my Mori Duraturn, but it does appear to be adequate.
With that said, on my machines I use stations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 for OD work, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 are ID.
Stations 11 and 12 are the "flexible" stations, normally set as 11 = ID 12 = OD, but these are the ones I change if I need one or two more tools for one thing or another.
These are also the ones taking "odd" tools such as face groovers, knurling tools or otherwise nonstandard stuff.
The benefit in for this arrangement in my case is that I also have a machine with a 10 station turret, where 1 - 5 are OD and 6 - 10 are ID, so if i have to send a program to one or the other, converting is much simpler.
