SEMINAR/WEBINAR ARCHIVE

Hello, my name is Jeff Kiszonas. I'm the EDM product manager for Makino Die/Mold. Thank you for attending today's Webinar, "What's hot in Wire EDM, and getting the most out of your Wire EDM. We'll also be talking about Makino's BellyWIZARD wire technology and how you'd get the most out of your wire EDM machine.

There are a few goals that we would like to achieve in the Wire EDM process and some of the things that we're going to talk about here will help you achieve these goals. You want to try to get as much unattended machining time with your Wire EDM as possible. You want to make sure that the machine can run unattended without somebody just standing and watching it operate. Anytime you can have someone set up another job on another machine tool while one machine is running a job, it's going to make you more profitable.

You want to try to do automated multi-part processing. Some of the things that we talk about here with parts setup and engineering and planning can also help with this automated multipart processing, whether you're using an automatic tool changer or a pallet changing robot. You want to look at how you could get multiple parts setup on the table and, in some cases, even multiple jobs so that you could just hit the "Go button, let the machine and the robot do their thing, and walk away and do other work on other machine tools. You also want to help maximize your uptime and reduce your downtime with maintenance, and some of the things in this presentation will help you realize these things.

The supporting infrastructure to help you achieve this is going to include things like your programming system and your wire EDM tooling system. The programming system can be very powerful or it can be less powerful depending on the type of work you do, but you want to make sure that the programming system you choose is going to be good for the jobs that you take in. And as far as the wire EDM tooling system, there are a number of good tooling systems out there but, like the programming system, you want to make sure that you get yourself set up with a tooling system that's gonna match your needs for your kinds of jobs.

In this presentation we're going to show you how to get the most out of your wire EDMs. You want to look at several things when you're looking at a machine tool for your shop floor. You want to select a solid well-built machine tool. The tool must be rigid, accurate and mechanically well made. This machine tool also has to have a user-friendly control system, a software control that will help you select the proper cutting conditions and shorten setup times so that anybody can use the machine from a novice user to an experienced EDM'er.

You also want to look at technologies to help reduce things like consumable usage and wire consumption rates. You should also look to find things that help improve rough cut operations without increasing wire feed rate, which in turn decreases the profitability of the job. Lastly, you want to balance accuracy and speed. You want look at technologies that will help reduce things like skim passes, which will also help reduce consumable usage. And you also want to use well thought-out job engineering and prep, and we'll discuss some of these in detail as we go through the presentation.

Solid and accurate

One of the things we want to talk about is accuracy. This is defined in Webster's Dictionary as, "a degree of conformity of a measure to a standard or a true value. This could very easily be defined in the shop or as simply a good part. When we talk about accuracy there are several different accuracies you need to be concerned with. What are we looking for? What are we measuring? What are the allowable tolerances for the job you're working on? Some of the important accuracy issues that come up on any job would include part straightness, surface finish and geometric size. They're all different and they all require different measurement methods.

How does accuracy fit in and apply to wire EDM? Well, everybody wants to make good parts, but with all the different jobs and different industries, there are a lot of variables and all these different variables can help contribute to making accuracy a very difficult thing to achieve.

There are several things to be concerned about with just the physical wire EDM process itself. wire EDM, first of all, means wire electrical discharge machining. We're going to use spark erosion to remove material. We use a wire which passes completely through a work piece. This wire is only used once because it is consumed as it travels through the work piece. The wire is actually eroded away a little bit as the work piece itself is cut away.

The wire will enter the work piece at its full diameter of, say, 0.008. When it exits the workpiece at the other side, it's going to be slightly smaller in diameter because of this eroding away of the wire as it does its job. This leads to unintentional machining of a taper in most workpieces.