Running an Okuma MB-4000H Horizontal CNC Machine: What It's Been Like the First Two Months!

[@Andrewlang90]

A great way to use the NG Tool storage in the matrix, beyond using it as timer/part tool replacement counters is to use it to stage you next 4 tools to limit the amount of travel the matrix rabbit has to do. Also, always double check the tool goes in right. Always verify the green light on the tool holder tree is on. Trust me, putting it in wrong makes a mess to deal with Yes the machine is ultra rigid. It has a 20K hr spindle life. When it goes, it sounds like a jet plane crashing. When it comes to tools being pre-staged, you can hit the Next Tool Return, call up your tool, change it, and hit Next Tool Prep. Also, you can sister-group number your tools in the case of using a tool on a lot of jobs. When the counter timer hits part/minutes count, the machine won’t sit alarmed out, it will call the next sister tool and continue the job. You can call for tool checks after certain actions. I’m rambling, but I run 4 MB4000H’s hooked to a Fastems 84 pallet crane system. Just trying to give you what I can. Great machine.

[@SuperstarComponentsLTD]

I didn’t realise top end carbide endmills actually wear out in aluminium until I got a 32 pallet matsuura MAM72🤣 running non stop 24/7 I worked out the 16mm was cutting 32 BILLION chips before replacing. Yeah that’s a once a month changer 💪

[@Alex-rf1md]

daily use of a aluminium ball nose in PETG and PLA finishing, I get over a year of tool life. It became a joke in the NC dept. for tool life "optimization" when we have to order a spare haha

[@pocketcharleywithgosiger]

Hey there John, pre-staging a tool does not prevent you from using the Matrix to service OTHER tools while running. If a tool is staged when you turn on the MANUAL INTERVENTION button, the NEXT TOOL RETURN button will illuminate allowing you to put the staged tool away temporarily and free up the robot to do any magazine operation you'd like. Once completed, press the NEXT TOOL RESTAGE button. Viola!

[@johnhines3591]

Ran Okumas a lot over my 35 years. Our shop made our own steel tombstones. Had them welded up, machined base & faced square & on center. We even made our own pallets. Mounted tooling permanently on tombstone. Used forklift to swap pallets on & off machine. Offsets auto loaded in program. Changing jobs, chip to chip was under 90 minutes. Set up time almost completely eliminated. Adding a probe , you can ensure quality. We had 6 okuma horizontal mills, about 100 pallets & almost no set up time. 1 person can keep 2 or 3 mills running.

[@harrelsontrumpets]

It's great to see you finally buying high quality machines. Congrats on another Okuma!

[@FenderBender503]

I Run this exact combo at work. It is great except for when you are only running one job on one pallet. The way we go about it is run two dummy pallets behind the main pallet so it will kick the main out to the work station. You should look into Fastems. We have a 3 cell MB5000H with a 30 Pallet Fastems System. Love the channel BTW. Im a Long time lurker. You guys along with This Old Tony and Abom79 inspired me to become a Machinist. Graduating next week with a two year CNC Machining degree and continuing on to get my Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering!

[@newfablesam]

I really like this guy. His enthusiasm and knowledge over machining is infectious

[@vinatron8075]

I don’t know how the post processor is setup however I just thought I’d mention I know with haas they have a tool precall option where the machine will grab the next tool and have it ready for the side mount tool changers. because sometimes they take a long time to index to the tool in the program depending on how many pockets away a tool is. The way it works with haas is after it calls out the main tool for the operation with T# M06 after it will issue T# of the next tool without an M06 so it doesn’t change to that tool. however the changer will index to that pocket so when you actually call the tool it will just be a quick swap and your not wasting time on waiting for the changer to index to the desired tool. I hope this helps and I’m probably not the first to mention this love the videos and keep up the good work!

[@annettecarroll9149]

John, we are so glad that this machine is making an impact in your business!

[@precisionrp]

We got our MB-4000H a few months ago. Almost the exact same setup you have, but 20,000 rpm HSK spindle. The goal is to run production at night using high part density fixturing that will allow the machine to run 15 hours unattended. This way the machine is finishing up at 7 am when we come in and we can run low production parts during the day. Then at 4 pm we run one more load of the low production parts with the night production pallets.

[@ricardo-iw9sq]

I love your enthusiasm and how you have grown, I've always been in the boat of having the proverbial carrot being dangled with the opportunity of doing small r & d and then getting more work but 98% of the time we don't get the production work even when I tell them I will invest in machines, I know its the chicken and the egg, if I don't have the machine I don't get the work but if I don't get the work but have a machine then I'm screwed. At the moment I'm trying to workout weather to buy a haas mini mill or a [ UK] XYZ 500 LR to machine tool steel parts P20 H13 O1 D2 as all I need is a machine with tool changer, my factory doesn't have any spare space at all so I will have to sacrifice 1 or 2 machines to get a small VMC. I wish in some ways I pulled the trigger 15 years ago but I'm a job shop and don't have a product [ billions of ideas].

[@homeworkshopengineering]

If you are in the UK I would steer clear of HAAS unless you are a big player. They left me at bottom of pile for any breakdowns and would end up being down for a week to 4 weeks at a time. UK service is terrible and they don’t have enough engineers so go with who is biggest and screaming when it comes to service I didn’t go XYZ for my mill as the linear rails were very small on machine I looked at. If you aren’t taking big cuts and don’t won’t quick rapids then it won’t be an issue. I sold a HAAS with 35 cut hours to buy a 9 year old machine to get better Service and reliability

[@ricardo-iw9sq]

@@homeworkshopengineering thanks, its a mine field trying to work out what to get, I'm not interested in massive cuts and rapids [ titans🤭] I'm after un maned tool changer so I can set it up to run for a hour or so so I can then run other machines or answer the phone, most of my jobs aren't time critical unless it's a brake down but mainly I have a few weeks to a few months. The main thing is it needs to be repeatable and accurate with dowel hole centers.

[@mattiasarvidsson8522]

he will fail eventually for being too young in the role of a CEO. .. Still look like a teen and being too enthusiastic and naive... Maybe if he gain 100 lbs, grows a 19th century mustasch, drinks whiskey to get a manly voice, smokes cigarr and act serious..

[@Dasman5624]

Wow i cant believe how your shop now looks very full. A lot different from when there was only 1 VMC in there. Always great content John from your very fist video thanks.

[@davestrong6472]

John Langmuir used a basic cement bed, I just put a deposit on their machine and your vises, I’m planning on doing a epoxy bed on their machine and would love to see how your doing your pour. This is the start of my CNC adventure and been following you for many years . Thanks Dave

[@craazyy22]

I used Okuma quite a bit. Sometimes i get parts or jobs that require to machine just outside the "limits" of the machine. Okuma got soft limits for all their axis. You can change these if you want slightly more travel in a direction. You might be able to use this if you want your Y lower. You didn't mention CAS, Have you guys set that up yet? And for tool life, Part probing is the best way to go to avoid making many bad parts overnight with a slightly worn tool.

[@AllToDevNull]

So you want regular automatic visual inspection of the tool with either go/nogo or dynamic adaption of the toolpath to compensate for the changed tool.

[@nfcorrie9713]

Glad to see you are happy with purchase. I forecast this decision at IMTS 2018 at the Makino booth, you were going over an A51 off camera on the side of my group. Also, tool counters and data collection on how long your tools last will be a game changer for your automation.

[@Devonhjf]

I work with some older mb4000 and 5000s. i use to watch your old videos while i ran those machines, i was so excited to hear you got yourself one. ours dont have the pallet pool, but they do have the matrix. on the matrix, there should be a next tool return button that will store the preped tool in order for you to do whatever you need to do. when your all done, press the next tool reprep button and it should return the tool to the shifter.

[@Alex-rf1md]

at about 10 minutes, mentioning Hmc vs Vmc rigidity but also considering the thombstone, yes, the Horizontal spindle is more rigid that a V Cframe but the V table is usualy more rigid than the overhang of the thombstone

[@bridged13b]

We have and Ma500 at work and I can confirm that rigidity isnt as good as a verticle. However we also have an old Mc50 and that thing is a tank! I belive the difference is in how the pallets are mounted/clamped. The old style has one big platen that basically slides into a big tslot and pulls the pallet down onto 6 lapped pads, where as the new style has 4 tapers and uses a pullstud arangment.

[@lvxleather]

Rigtht on man, glad to see the machine has been so problem free so far. Having the tool and pallet capacity is definitely the way to go. I look forward to seeing how the tombstones turn out, I'll probably be having to do something similar in the future.

[@wrighty338]

2 Okuma's in a short space of time, sounds like you are loving them and i can see why!

[@matthewvanlew5891]

How well does fusion handle the posting of the code needed to run the pallet pool? The way I understand it is for the pallet pool to work you need to use sub programs.

[@OakwoodMachineWorks]

I've been waiting for this video!

[@95dodgev10]

We're getting ready to take delivery on a fermat wft15 cnc horizontal boring mill with a b axis rotary table. Fusion 360 doesn't have a perfect post for the machine. However watching your videos as well as others has given me the confidence to not only learn 4 axis capabilities but also learn how to modify a stock fanuc post to work with this machine. I wont know for sure until we get the machine installed but i think I've got it figured out. This is a hell of a step up from the hurco vmx50 we have. In the future we plan on getting a fermat wrf floor type boring mill with atleast 45ft of x travel and a powered universal head. It will be quite comical in a way to run that monster of a machine with a cad/cam program that costs pennies compared to most. Admittedly I'm not sure fusion will be able to because of the universal head so we may have to step up to something else but we'll see.

[@mistijim]

I hope that aluminum tombstone works out but there's two good reasons they're made from cast iron. Iron has 3x the Youngs modulus and 2x-6x the damping coefficient.

[@brendanmmann]

The place I work at has been using aluminum tombstones for probably 40 years now and never had a problem.

[@fusionsvt00]

I use my vertical cncs like you do your horizontal. Multiple vises in each cnc with a part tending fanuc robot. It runs all day and all night if I need it to.

[@Ale_Lab]

Amazing machine. Looking forward to the epoxy granite content. I have to fill up my CNC and I am still not sure which recipe to use.

[@HardRockBLK]

You can store the staged tool to use the matrix. Then you can call or put away any tool you need and then when you’re finished you can hit the re stage tool button and then turn the switch. Also m64 stores any stages tools

[@coreyb4073]

Tsugami uses the term loop of force, basically how much distance is between the part and the tool going the long way, longer distance=less rigid. if your working at the top of your tombstone your probably close to 8 feet, at the bottom 4 feet. we run similar parts in 1215 and 316ss, the 1215 can be a fully loaded tombstone, the 316 we only use the bottom 6" of the tombstone.

[@zacktucker5395]

On the matrix turn the switch to allow manual access, then one of the buttons should illuminate and say “next tool return” it will allow the staged tool to go back to its designated pot. Then you can just type in the tool number you want to call to the load station and call it up normally. If the machine calls a tool change it will just stop and wait until you are done. If it calls a tool change while you are in the matrix the restart light will start flashing, finish checking your tools at the load station, put the tools back in their designated pots, then the restart light will be flashing, turn off the manual override switch and click restart. The machine with pick back up right where it left off.

[@tonydique4554]

Awesome progress John 😊

[@micahhunter2706]

About your pre-staged tool blocking you from changing inserts on other tools, how long does it take for the tools to do a tool change without pre-staging?

[@damientoomey1194]

The opinion about horizontals being more rigid than verticals is likely from the older style horizontals where the spindle moves in the Z and the pallet moves in the X. Mazak, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and likely many more brands used that configuration before about 2000. We have a 1995 Mazak FH480 and it is a beast, large linear rails, 3 trucks per rail and 4.5kW servos. Stupid rigid and accurate. We also have a 2000 FH5800 with the more modern configuration. It’s build lighter for very fast movements but not as rigid as the older girl.

[@brandonmahoney3550]

Another great video guys.

[@jaro6985]

DIY pallet looks great.

[@hampfi747]

Awesome video! But to be honest all that excitement about the horizontal is less so with the horizontal machine as it is with the automation and pallet pool. A palettiezed vertical or 5x machine would have had almost the same effect on the business, no?

[@rdc02271]

Newbie alert! I wondered why they did not choose something like the Midaco (it is the only one I know) 4th axis trunnion automatic pallete changer. It should be possible to add more pallets. In my newbie opinion something like that would be more flexible and possibly cheaper. But people keep buying horizontal cnc so I am clearly missing something.

[@texasermd1]

Very cool video. Congratulations on upping your game! Are you able to give a rough estimate of the all-in cost for this equipment, delivered, and installed?

[@MrUberJoker]

It would be really nice to know the price of setup like that...

[@TNStuff]

Looking Fresh and Confident! Did the okuma give you that haircut? Looks precise!

[@sachie123]

What is with you "John's"?🤣🤣🤣🤯. I keep saying the same thing over and over again...i am absolutely amazed..more power to you👊👊

[@jasonquade9284]

Does anyone make a horizontal that supports the top of the pallet in some manor? Thinking like a tail stock on a lathe that can come in and give it the support it clearly wants to balance the force.

[@normxd8426]

Great Video. Im just a bit distracted by the I guess 6 inch Face Mill on the tolling cart in the Background

[@michaelgrimes9153]

We do a lot of production work on aluminum we use pcd custom tools gives us great finish and last forever

[@greg2337]

My dream is to run my product on a horizontal Okuma. So many advantages over the vertical

[@angrydragonslayer]

Have you tried a millturn? I obviously don't know your product but they're worth a look

[@greg2337]

@@angrydragonslayer If it was round it would be on a Mill Turn

[@fryer05maverick31]

@@greg2337 Doesn't have to be round when finished just round to begin. I make rectangle parts on my lathe . I just start out with 2" round.

[@greg2337]

@@fryer05maverick31 True! The best part of a Horizontal beside rigidity is access and chip evacuation. And Price. A mill turn is usually more than a horizontal but is a more capable machine.

[@angrydragonslayer]

@@greg2337 i've fed rectangle bars into one (which was both horrifying and exhilarating) but i agree, it's best to stick to round stock

[@bcbloc02]

Yes tall tombstones are floppy. I can almost guarantee if you run a 3/4” drill bit at full feed and speed at the top of the tombstone it likely will deflect away .002 to .003” . Not normally an issue but do a deep bore and your thru hole position will be off a noticeable amount.

[@aydenwhite2771]

See you at IMTS!

[@50STUNT]

I was wondering if you would ever step up to a horizontal. massive time saver for prototype or production. verticals are a waste of time

[@bigbird2100]

Great video 👍So are you getting another akuma with a robot cell and sell some verticals?

[@davidcashin9194]

Hi John Another great video I have been watching since you were in you grand fathers shed it is fantastic to see the growth of the business. Next time you talk to Grimsmo can you ask him why he has dropped kicked his you tube, disappointed not to see how he is going.

[@bcbloc02]

He doesn’t need you tube for advertising and he can either spend his time to make a $1000 knife or the same time and make. $30 video. How would you choose to spend your time?

[@davidcashin9194]

@@bcbloc02 Then in that case he should tell all his subscribers that he no longer needs them or wants them and delete his channel pretty simple. Then all can un-subscribe and find some one else that needs some help.

[@bcbloc02]

@@davidcashin9194 His content and journey is still interesting and good viewing even if it is not current. Why would someone delete it? You make it sound like his subscribers are paying his bills and I would imagine at least directly that likely has never been a big factor for him.

[@mkegadgets4380]

What days are you gonna be at IMTS?

[@nyccnc]

Hopefully the ones that end in Y

[@mattbigham9954]

Why not get a Haas ?

[@JonBanquer]

Fusion 360 needs the ability to optimize tombstone rotation.

[@bradleyswanson329]

Instead of using a camera would it be possible to remote into the control thru a VPN and check the status, I know that Hass and a few others support it.

[@MrUberJoker]

Okumas are windows based right? So you can basically do any monitoring app afaik..

[@DM-qm5sc]

You look just like the guy in AMMO NYC youtube channel. Is that another channel of yours?

[@aniveshchaturvedi9886]

what is capex investment is such nice giant

[@evanlacava9213]

Awesomeeeee 💪🏻💪🏻 🇺🇸 🇯🇵

[@vittoriosilva1454]

RE: ballvalve ,,, a spring returns it to open position ,,, not a capacitor ....

[@Qui_Gon_Ben]

I ran the piss out of one of those machines. great machine. fast!

[@thefahj-122]

a horizontal will make you more money per square foot than a vertical that fits in that same area