Pulling Ahead: Tool attached to CNC machining center makes it extra easy to move and work bar products

 Above: Accudyne Corp. makes a variety of products from different shaped steel bars. Pulling bar through machining centers required a smarter tool.

October, 2024: Accudyne Corp., located in Englewood, Colorado, is a machine shop started by Dan Kenner. Kenner’s vision was to create a bar puller for his CNC machines because of the frustration and time wasted setting up and fine-tuning traditional bar pullers. These are tools that pull bar products through the machining center so that Cutting can be done at varying lengths.

Kenner sold Accudyne Corp. to the owners of Richardson Metals, an aluminum extruder in Colorado Springs, in 2021. Along with Accudyne Corp. came Accudyne Products, a subsidiary that Kenner created to design and sell the patented EZ-Puller products.

“What we learned at Accudyne Corp. was that the lathe work is oft en short-runs 10 to 50 pieces or up to 500 to 1,000 pieces,” says John Tassone, who co-owns Accudyne and Richardson Metals alongside Rick Werner.

“In most cases, the short run nature of many jobs does not warrant the lengthy setup of a traditional bar puller it takes too much time. However, running jobs without a bar puller meant we had to have an operator in front of the machine to manually pull the bar after each part was completed.

“This was lost production time. We needed a bar puller that could be set up for any bar diameter, within the range of the tool, in seconds. The tool needed to be reliable, repeatable, rapid and rugged enough to stand up to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pulls,” Tassone explains.

A few prototypes and modifications later, says Tassone, Kenner developed “this excellent tool that does exactly what he wanted it to do and even more. The EZ-Puller can pull not only round, but octagon, hex and square stock without spindle orientation (which stops the spindle in a defi ned angle position).”

X VALUE

To change from one bar size to another bar size, all that is required is to change one number, the X value (destination) in the bar pull routine. The X value is provided in the chart that comes with the tool.

The EZ-Puller now comes in multiple editions that accompany round, square, hex and fl at stock in different diameters. Each tool is adjustable as well.

The 3.0 EZ-Puller is able to pull without using an M19 for spindle orientation; the tool can orient itself

Eventually, Accudyne Products also created the Big EZ to accommodate larger bar stock sizes. This tool operates in the same repeatable and productively efficient way. The range for the BigEZ is 1.750- to 3.25-inchdiameter round stock.

Then, based on customer demand, “we introduced an expanded capacity bar puller that has a range of 0.093- to 2.0 inches.

“Our products are designed with longevity and repeatability in mind and are manufactured in the United States,” says Werner. The tools come with a two-year warranty, and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

“Our mission at Accudyne Products is to increase accuracy, productivity and profits on the machine shop floor by introducing innovative tools that will benefit the machinists who choose to use them,” he says.

The company offers two more sizes of bar puller as well. The 3.0 EZPuller bar puller has the capacity to manage round bar from 0.093 to 2.75 inches for round bar, 0.25 to 1.75 inches for hex bar, and 0.25 to 1.0 inch for square bar.

“With the auto-adjusting cam design, our tool can change between any bar shape and size with a simple change of your X value in your bar pull subroutine. This X value represents the additional distance the tool will need to move to accommodate each bar size,” Tassone explains.

Like the other models, the 3.0 EZ-Puller is able to pull without using an M19 for spindle orientation by simply unlocking the spindle so the tool can orient the bar itself for pulling. As the hardened steel grippers advance over the bar, the internal urethane springs are compressed. For non-round bars, the bar is oriented to safely grab onto the flats. Once the tool is on the centerline of the bar, the collet opens and the bar is pulled to any desired length. The collet then closes, and the tool moves away from the bar for a tool change.

The Expanded Capacity BigEZ bar puller can handle round bar from 1.750- to 3.750-inch diameters. “Due to the larger bar sizes and weights, we designed this tool with a polygon-shaped, hardened steel gripper. This gripper design gives the tool two points of contact on each gripper and allows users to safely pull very heavy bars,” according to Tassone.

THREADING

Some machine shops have sought to automate their CNC lathes to pull threaded bar stock or may need to cut threads on a part before pulling it out to part-off. Previously, according to Werner, there was no commercial tool on the market for bar pulling over threads. Accudyne Products will be releasing in the fall of 2024, the EZ-Puller ThreadMaster, which will pull a variety of types and sizes of threads without damage.

“Our design incorporates a urethane-coated gripper for soft, but repeatable bar pulling,” Werner says. The ThreadMaster is easy to set up and easy to adjust for different bar sizes. “Once the tool is set in your lathe, our self-adjusting design simply requires a change in the X value in your bar pull subprogram to change from one bar size to the next. The readMasters come in two sizes.” One handles 1.75- to 5-inch diameters and the second handles 2- to 4.5-inch-diameter products.

The company also stocks replacement parts for its pullers and provides setup instructions for machine shops that use these tools.

Accudyne Products stocks replacement parts for its pullers and provides setup instructions for users

Accudyne Products, 303/991-1500, accudyneproducts.com.

 

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