Many of you are familiar with the Mach-1 Quick Change Tooling System offered for Bridgeport-style knee mills by Mach-1 Systems, Inc., which allows you to change R8 tooling by just pushing the quill lever to immediately engage or disengage your cutting tool. We received several requests for this system in the past, but were unable to provide it due to differences between the Bridgeport's spindle and our own. For those of you who didn't see the announcement we made to the manufacturer's forum, we received our first shipment of Mach-1 Quick Change Tooling System sets a short while ago, which are a new style offered by their manufacturer designed to work with our mills. In-house tests have proved successful (several sets are in use on our in-house mills as I write this, which has made our machinists very happy), and we've already shipped several units to early requesters.

The design works with both our manual and CNC products, and replaces the mill's standard draw bar while keeping the normal use of the quill. Tool length offsets are retained between each tool change. The holding force on the tools is 600 pounds, applied using a preset die spring coupled with a hardened and ground ball coupling.

Since this is a new product for our mills, we wanted to find out if there were any technical or usage questions we can address. As we collect and answer them here, we will be adding them to our website as well.