QUESTIONS ON TAPPING FUNCTION OF THE VOYAGER DVR DRILL PRESS
The following are some of the questions I have:
- How are chips broken up?
- Does it stop and back up and then continue forward?
- Do I need to keep pressure on the feed?
- What happens if the tap slips in the chuck?
- Should I have flats ground on the shaft of the tap?
- How does it know when to stop tapping?
- Will it automatically reverse when done?
- What happens if I make a mistake on hole depth and the tap bottoms out?
ANSWER:
Many of your questions are answered in the provided manual (see Italics below), but further explanation is provided here:
IMPORTANT: The tapping function is recommended for 5/16" (or M8) taps and above. The smaller sized taps may break under high torque from the motor therefore the user should take care when using the tapping mode on smaller sized taps
The tapping feature has two options for programmed cycles for tapping. Both modes require the user to manually feed the tap during tapping and should only be used when starting the drill in the Forward direction.
1. Load Sense – This mode will use the load sensor to determine when it has started tapping and enter a chip breaking cycle. This cycle uses the load sensor to determine when the drill needs to switch to reverse to chip break for a fixed amount of time, and then returns to forward to tap again. This repeats until the drill press senses the tapping is complete via the load OR if the user presses the button. NOTE: Recommended for through-hole tapping only.
- Pre-tapping: The motor starts up and the machine tries to determine what the average 'non-tapping' load is at the given speed
- Tapping: When the machine detects an increase in load, it will know it is tapping and will constantly monitor the load until a drop has been detected or if the load is close to the pre-tapping value
- Reverse Out: If the drop in load has been detected, for example if the tap has exited the hole, the drill press will begin to reverse out.
NOTE: Recommended for through-hole tapping only.
2. Chip Breaker – This mode will use the load sensor to determine when it has started tapping and enter a chip breaking cycle. This cycle uses a fixed amount of time before switching to reverse to chip break for a fixed amount of time, and then it returns to forward to tap again. This repeats until the drill press senses the tapping is complete via the load OR if the user presses the button.
- Pre-tapping: The motor starts up and the machine tries to determine what the average 'non-tapping' load is at the given speed
- Tapping: When the machine detects an increase in load, it will know it is tapping and will constantly monitor the load until a drop has been detected or if the load is close to the pre-tapping value
- Chip Breaking: Reverses motor, and compares the backward load with the fwd. If the FWD load is greater than a certain threshold compared to the REV load, then the machine considers this situation as "still tapping"
- Reverse Out: If the reversing load is similar to the FWD load, then the bit is deemed 'not tapping' and will reverse out.
Other things to review/note:
What firmware version are you running? There are many improvements made on the newest firmware, including some made for tapping.
The voyager uses load sensing for a lot of its operations and will shut down in many scenarios where the tap jams/the load spikes abnormally, but it will not be able to sense that the chuck is slipping on the tap. Flats could help with this. The load spike threshold can be changed or turned off (not recommended) in the Drill Settings/Motor Performance.
We wouldn't recommend fully relying on the load sensing to prevent damage from bottoming out in a blind hole. Use the User Set Depth feature for this.
We would recommend turning the power output setting of the drill press down to low for any tapping operations to reduce the risk of breaking taps. This is also found in the Drill Settings/Motor Performance menu.
Alternate Workarounds for Firmware R2P05:
- For small taps or those which do not work correctly in the tapping mode, use the "User Set Depth" function to set the desired tapping depth. Then, change the Set Depth Reached function to "Stop and Rev (top)". This will allow the Voyager to tap blind holes and reverse out automatically (more or less the same function as "load sensing", but it won't rely on the load sensing to trigger the reverse out).
-Pressing the ON button during tapping will immediately force the drill press to "Reverse Out."