Fun with the Deckel punch milling attachment

Hello

I thought I'd post some pics of my curentof my current "work"...
I'm pretty interested in tool grinding, and I've managed to put together a nice Deckel S11 and most of the useful accessories for that machine. Not bad, but that wasn't enough ! The machine lacked the hyper hype original vision system.

I had an Isoma coordinate microscope laying around so I decided to machine an bracket to mount it on the S11 workhead.

The general ideal looks like this :



There are a lot of reasons for wanting a good vision system when grinding tools. Firstly, for better view of what you're doing, but also to measure angles. Slight mistakes in the positionning of the tool or the wheel can affect the result drastically and without a good sight at what's going on, it's not only easy to simply understand what went wrong... Beeing self taught (or still self-learning to be more precise), I know that the microscope will come in handy very often.

The Isoma microscope is rather heavy so I wanted the bracket to be as light as possible. Aluminium is light but there was no reason to keep unnecessary material anyway, so I decided to machine a pocket on the backside of the bracket.

That was the opportunity to use the x-y Deckel punch milling attachment I had bought a few years abot NOS for *** euros (some of you don't want to know the ridiculous price I paid for it but those who know me know it was not much ;))...



Anyway, once mounted on the dividing head, you're adding five axis (!) to the little FP1 !

"Measure twice, cut once they say".... But with such a setup, the complete saying becomes "measure twice, make as much sketches as you can, cut once" !
I found the Deckel scribe tool to be a great help in order to check my calculations (and also take references for points I was to lazy or too dumb to find by calculation ! :rolleyes5:)

I'm not familiar with contouring, and I must say that the punch milling attachment was an invaluable accessory for that kind of work. With 80mm of travel in both x and y, it really helped me switching from one point to another to make the contouring operations that required a rotation of the dividing head. For roughing first, then for finishing.

It's only after the work was done, that I realized how many clamping / unclamping and manipulations of the part would have been required without it....

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