I have a repeat job requiring centre drilling, drilling 20mm deep and boring to size and realised I could do it with one turret position and leave a tooling block set up for the part if I could use gang tooling in a tool turret holder, provided there was a way of mixing tool types on multiple edges of one tool on the Siemens 808D controller.
Step 1 was to face some EN8 square on the Syil X7 and drill the holder mounting holes
Attachment 30310
Then there were a bunch more holes from various sides with one at 10 degrees in order to make machining the gang tooling holders a 3 Axis milling job. Next the holder was machined on the X7 to almost fill the pocket in the turret (which normally accommodates a tool and clamping wedge), this shows a comparison of my gang holder with the standard holder for drills etc.
Attachment 30311
The gang tooling holders were then drilled and reamed in-situ on the lathe to accept 16mm round shank tooling giving me this.
Attachment 30312
It turns out that I could have made the holders significantly longer and retained clearance for the turret to rotate, so at some point I will measure the exact clearance and make some longer ones with higher capacity.
