Dear all, I have written Judy Hoch directly since she is the “one who
wrote the book” but I wanted to ask you out in Orchid land. Does any
one have experience with centrifugal disk finishers? My idea is this;
I have my website up and if I make a sale I need to have inventory to
be able to ship with in 2 business days (which is my goal for the
website). If I have a CDF I could make the piece with in my time
frame and ship with out having to carry inventory of finished items.
My production is such that the metal work is simplified and I can
easily meet the deadline except for the finishing. I have been using
vibratory tumblers for months now and the cycle time is in terms of
days. I run 3 different tumblers with three different grits for 8
hour cycles and one for a 48 hour cycle per batch. The CDF should be
able to bring the cycle time down to hours. Thanks for any
help, Sam Patania
Sam the centrifigul disk finisher will do the job much faster than
virbratory, but they are expensive and they wear themselves out
fast. The bowl isurethane and they are costly. The ones I have used
are german made. William skyles can tell you all about them he runs
5 or 6 of them 24/7 doing massfinishing for a production line that
he has. give me a call and I can put you in touch.
Ill second what Kevin has to say, they do the work fast, real fast,
but there is a learning curve to them as well. I have a couple and
use them for very specific purposes.
Second is the price of the machines, some will set you back quite a
few grand. You’ll want to experiment with media as well, what works
well in a vibratory, may do different things in a disk. Most CDF’s
are either “wet” or “dry” only a couple can do both types of media.
The people I would talk with are the Otec people, probably the best
in their field of finish work, you can send them samples and have
them do test runs for you, and get their recommendations I would look
at the ECO line of their machines. The big thing is going to be the
size of your parts, and how many you want to finish, that will
determine the size of machine you would want to get.
http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep7zuz
Good luck!
P@