Hi again Donkey Hotey:
Here are a few views of an octagonal laydown turret occupieed with some tools:
First unmodified conventional tooling in two possible orientations on the turret:
You can see a couple of problems immediately.
First, the tool at station 8 clutters up the turret.
Second, by the time you add a holder block to clamp the tool the one at station 8 is hard to make and grabs the tool way back from the cutting edge unless you make something creative.
If you want to mount two tools the way I show, the holder at station 2 uses a single screw unless you use the tee slot at station 1 too, in which case the toolholder prevents you from turning a long workpiece with the tool in station 8.
No problem, let's just cut off the tools and make them stubby to de-clutter the turret:
Now your tool clamps get really interesting to implement, and station 1 is still unusable, except maybe if you can crowd a shortie centerline tool in there and juggle everything so you don't hit anything.
OK, you say...let's mount a mix of stick tooling and gang tooling:
You can see where this goes with an octagonal turret...it's not a great design if you want to use conventional tooling mounted similarly to how you'd mount tools if you had no turrret and had a conventional toolpost instead.
Contrast that to your square turret:
Since the corners are not clipped off, you can mount tools pretty much conventionally and run them like you'd run a four way toolpost like Asian lathes are commonly supplied with.
The drawback, as you know is that you have fewer tools you can mount and ganging tools across the turret face is harder because the turrret body gets in the way for all the tools you try to mount in the center of the face.
Tools at the front end of the square turret and tools at the back end of the turret are OK...you can hang the back of the bar , or drill chuck arbor or whatever into the slots that are parallel to the spindle axis, but this sometimes crowds out those slots so they become unavailable to you.
If you want to gang across the face, your best option is to cut off the top of the turret like they've done with the CL-1...now you can take better advantage of the real estate the turret provides, and find the best holder block scheme to cram as many tools as you can across the turret faces .
But now, with a square turret, if you mount any conventional stick tools in a station, perpendicular to the spindle axis, you cannot mount centerline tools or gang mounted tools on the adjacent station (the one that faces the chuck) or you'll pound them into the chuck or the workpiece when you try to run the stick tools, unless you set up very carefully.
That's why I'm such a fan of gang tooling layouts on these tiny machines with
octagonal laydown turrets.
But the square turret remains a problem any time you gang mount tools...with the octagonal turret, the adjacent stations allow the tools to be angled away from the chuck and workpiece, so you have a better chance of success without whanging anything.
On your square turret, you actually increase the hazard if you gang mount some of your tools...so I'm not a fan of square turrets when you need to be able to mount lots of tools...machines that use toolposts are safer IMO, especially for beginners.
It may be slow and require you to change the tools out manually, but at least the chances of a collision are less.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com
On edit:
A stray thought...if you gang everything and abandon all your stick tools for your TL-1, you could run it without hazard.
Station 1 is facing the spindle...2 and 3 are pointing to X positive and X negative
Station 4 is pointing to Z positive.
Nothing will crash as long as the turret stays to the right of the end of the workpiece...so bars for all external turning.
Mill off the top of the turret until it is 0.5" below the centerline of the spindle and put tee slots around the periphery.
Mount 2 gang toolholder blocks for 3/4" bars all pointing outward like guns on a battleship.
Enjoy 8 available stations.
Alternatively:
Make two blocks with 3/4" bores all the way through and bolt them into two slots positioned 180 degrees apart.
Make them fat enough that you can put two cross holes in each one so you have two blind holes facing out to X positive and X negative.
Make two double ended bars for the through holes
Get four straight shank collet chucks for the blind bores and cut them off short so they don't hang out too far.
Populate your turret with 8 tools and make the external tools back to back so each can cut on the opposite side of the spindle from its counterpart.
That should work well and it's easy to implement.
Bonus...you don't have to modify the turret.
Drawback, you have to accept the Z length of the tools that go in the blind bores because you obviously can't adjust the length of the stickout in Z
MC