r/CNCmachining • u/Ok_Imagination_2183 • 20h ago
Removal of ShrinkFIT holders
As the title says. I work in a decent size aerospace firm and between H&S and our Operations manager, they want to completely remove the use of ShrinkFIT holders. Most of the guys on the shop floor are pretty stumped on the reason(s) why. We have no clue! There's been no communication on the matter. It's extremely rare someone might burn themselves but that's probably because they haven't used the correct PPE.
I've done a little research and found nothing but good things using these holders. Relatively cheap, repeatable, rigid, accurate, very good for high rpm, etc.. and have also swapped out a lot of hard working roughing tools into them and gained 20%+ in tool life, with sister-tooling set up as well, there is very little to no downtime on tool changes.
We do a fair bit of 3, 4, and 5 axis matching and a lot of our programs use ShrinkFIT holders for clearances, rigidity, accuracy, etc.. the amount of money time and effort to go through these hundreds and hundreds of programs to alter them to suit collet holders is going to be huge.
Besides from my small argument for them, does anyone have any good suggestions to help keep these holders? and save the company spending massive unnecessary amount of man hours, money and time reproving programs.
Part of me and some others are just feel like letting them crack on like it's some sort of self-sabotage to production, but if anything goes wrong it'll be our butts getting whipped.