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Posts Tagged ‘cnc lathe’

What do Computer Numerically Controlled Lathe machines do? Ivan addresses this on his webpage by talking about the uses for CNC Lathes. Computer Numerically Controlled Lathes turn stock to remove the material.  Most parts coming off a CNC Lathe will be cylindrical and symmetrical. Visit the website for more info on this: CNC Lathe Turning

Producer of low volume reaction injection moulded parts and polyurethane castings uses five vertical machining centres to cut master pattern equipment from polyurethane tooling board

The Midas Pattern Company specialises in the production of low volume, high quality reaction injection moulded (RIM) parts and polyurethane castings (PuR). The company intends to dramatically shorten the time and cost for a designer to move from a CAD model to a fully functioning prototype/finished usable component.

The production material has to validate design and produce a saleable product.

Midas uses five Haas CNC vertical machining centres (VMC) – typically to cut the master pattern equipment from polyurethane tooling board.

Midas said that one of the main reasons for choosing Haas CNC machine tools was reliability and user-friendliness.

Based in Bedfordshire, UK, the Midas Pattern Company was established in 1989 as a precision foundry toolmaking company.

The company has developed into a substantial business integrating CADCAM and CNC toolmaking techniques with traditional pattern and mould making skills.

Managing director of Midas, Alan Rance, said: ‘We aim to dramatically shorten the time and cost for a designer to move from a CAD model to a fully functioning example of a new product – not just a prototype, but a finished part, made from production material that not only validates design but is truly saleable in the market place’.

Midas uses a novel composite tooling system, MRIM, which offers a production moulding technique that can produce quantities from 1 to 5000-off.

Midas said it is ideally suited for making large parts or components with multiple assemblies and complex features.

Rance said: ‘We make parts in the production intent polymers that enable our customers to produce low volume examples of new and prototype products without incurring the very high cost of metal tooling or the compromises in functionality and mechanical properties you expect with traditional RP techniques’.

Based on RIM and PuR, the company’s FASTrim service offers a competitive alternative to SLLS/Silicon and VAC casting.

FASTrim can provide finished parts in as little as 10-15 working days, using cast PuR and soft tooling CNC machined directly from 3D CAD data.

Typical customers include medical technology companies building low-volume, high value instrumentation – machines that can cost hundreds of thousands of Pounds each but are usually built in low numbers.

* About RIM – Rachel Collier, Midas’ technical sales manager, said that reaction injection moulding, utilising MRIM tooling is ideal for the instrumentation industry.

She said: ‘Customers may only want to produce between, say, 10 and 20 finished products a year.

For example, if a customer designs and builds a new mass spectrometry machine costing many thousands of Pounds, it wouldn’t make sense to lay down metal tooling suitable for thousands of parts when you only need a few’.

Many of today’s medical equipment manufacturing companies are relatively small – often founded by individuals departing larger organisations – and perhaps only aiming at niche markets.

As recently as 20 years ago, such companies probably wouldn’t have existed without the patronage of a corporate benefactor – a large, well-financed parent organisation, for example – or some other significant investor.

Developing a new product was hugely and prohibitively expensive.

These days, even small firms can use the services of companies like Midas Pattern to get their products to market at a fraction of the traditional cost and to compete head-on with the big, well-funded players.

‘We’re not a typical plastics company so we’re not obsessed with high-volumes,’ said Collier.

‘We’ve taken all of the techniques and the principles we’ve learnt in the very specialised foundry pattern-making sector and applied them to making high quality plastic parts in small numbers’.

The Midas process starts by building tooling models within CAD (Computer Aided Design).

From these CAD models complex CAM (Computer Aided Machining) software is used to generate cutter paths.

The code for these paths can then be downloaded to one of the company’s five Haas CNC VMCs.

The VMCs include a 12,000 rev/min spindle VF-4SS, a VF-6 with a 4th axis Haas rotary table.

There is a a large 2m x 1m VF9.

The machines typically cut master pattern equipment from polyurethane tooling board.

‘Once we have the master pattern equipment we then use it to produce a composite metallised resin injection mould tool – MRIM,’ said Collier.

‘That’s about as much as I can tell you.

The detail of the process is a closely guarded secret’.

She added that the skill – the ‘Midas touch’, one could say – is being able to make a good quality tool from the master pattern.

Each of the company’s CAD engineers is also a machine setter, programmer and operator, so when it came to choosing a CNC machine tool, said Haas to manufacturingtalk.com, top of the list of essential criteria were reliability and user-friendliness.

Thanks in part to the precision of the master pattern equipment, Midas MRIM Tooling is guaranteed to produce up to 5000 parts, which is usually far more than a customer needs but does allow them to be used for intermediate production volumes.

A typical mould is around a 1m3 in size, which in the world of mainstream injection moulding would be considered extremely large.

Collier made the point: ‘If you made a hard tool for a part of that size it would cost around 10 times more than one of our composite moulds.

We can also achieve the complexity but without having expensive mechanical movements’.

* Pattern making – pattern making is a labour intensive process, so Midas still relies on its own knowledge workers – skilled pattern and toolmakers – as well as its state-of-the-art machines.

To keep them all busy, the company supplements its core business with a range of other activities.

The Bedford factory, spread across two adjacent sites, is essentially a tool making facility, which produces foundry patterns, jigs and fixtures, rotational mould tools, inspection fixtures and exhibition models.

It also houses a number of Low Pressure RIM moulding machines producing low-runs of finished parts.

‘What all Midas products have in common,’ concluded Collier, ‘Is that they all start with CNC machining, which means that every time Midas delivers a tool or a finished part odds are it started life on a Haas CNC machine tool’.

* About Haas Automation – Haas said that CNC machine tool companies have led the ‘democratisation’ (or freeing up – Ed) of manufacturing production, perhaps none more so than Haas Automation itself, which claimed to be the original low-cost, high-specification machine tool builder.

Founded just twenty years ago in California, USA, but already with more than 85,000 of its products in operation around the world, Haas said it has certainly played an important part in getting affordable, reliable tools in the hands of the ‘industrious and the ingenious’, helping companies like Midas Pattern Company to ‘turn bright ideas into gold’.

German CNC lathe builder has redesigned its mill-turn centres that are over twice as rigid as earlier models, allowing an increased depth of cut to be taken to maximise metal removal rate

Index Werke, Germany, said that the higher the resonant frequency (RF) of a machine tool’s structure, the greater is its inherent stiffness and the more difficult it is for machining forces to induce vibration. Consequently, the company has redesigned its patented SpeedLine C-type mill-turning centres to increase their RF above that of all other lathes on the market, including existing models in its own range.

This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 11 February 2008 at 8.00am (UK)

The SpeedLine C-type 42mm and 65mm bar automatics, when launched in 2005, were the first in the world to replace conventional compound turret slides with two interconnected steel plates sliding directly over the machine bed.

The recent redesign of the range has seen these machines improved and two new models introduced with 30mm and 90mm bar capacities.

* Lathe build time reduced – at the same time, Index has reorganised C-type flow line assembly at its Esslingen factory, Germany, streamlining production and increasing throughput.

Whereas each machine used to spend one and a half days at each of 18 stations, this has been reduced to one day at each of 15 stations.

Said Richard Kingsbury, managing director of the sole UK agent, Geo Kingsbury Machine Tools, to manufacturingtalk.com: ‘The reorganisation has helped to keep machine cost down while maintaining top build quality’.

He added: ‘Further downward pressure on capital cost will result from economies of scale, as Index is planning to increase output of C-type machines by two-thirds in the second full year of production compared with the first’.

The defining characteristic of the lathes that provides such high RF and stiffness concerns the actuation of the turrets.

Each is mounted on a front plate while an interconnected rear retaining plate is driven kinematically from behind the machine bed.

The system is so novel and difficult to visualise without seeing the machine in action that Geo Kingsbury has made a video of the lathe that it will send on a memory stick to interested companies.

* Sliding plate system – the critical advantage of the sliding plate system, said Geo Kingsbury, is that the distance between the turret centreline and the point at which it is driven is much shorter than for a compound slide.

The turret and drive plates are fitted with ceramic-coated, hardened tool steel strips at top and bottom.

These slide over a third plate of surface-hardened cast iron fitted into the bed, the latter plate being effectively sandwiched between the other two.

The parallel kinematic drive to the rear plate is now effected by two (rather than the previous three) ballscrew-actuated rods at the back of the machine, one vertical and one horizontal.

Glass linear scales provide positional feedback.

* Three turrets – there has been another alteration to the C-type design whereby three separate turrets are provided instead of one single-sided and one double-sided turret.

This allows greater flexibility of machining, especially when three tools are in cut simultaneously, said Geo Kingsbury.

They work like as follows.

* Turret 1 moves in X,Y and Z above the spindle centreline and works at the main spindle.

* Turret 2 mounted below the spindles operates in X, Y and Z at either end.

* The motion of upper turret 3 is restricted to the X-axis and works only with the counter spindle, which moves in Z.

Up to 14 tools in each turret allows 42 VDI-20 tools to be used, although if a user wishes to continue working with VDI-25 toolholders, 10 stations are available per turret.

Repeatability of tool tip position is +/-8 micron, even with angled tools up to 100mm long.

Tool drive is up to 8,000 rev/min at all positions.

* Three machine frame sizes – there are two sizes of machine frame, designated C100 and C200.

The former is the host for the 30mm and 42mm bar capacity spindles.

The latter (to be shown at MACH 2008) is for the 65mm and 90mm spindles.

Distance between the main and counter spindles is 510mm and 710mm respectively.

All models are fast acting, with 1G acceleration in X and Z up to 60m/min for the smaller machines and 50m/min for the larger models.

Main spindle rating varies from 9,000 rev/min/20kW for the smallest machine to 3,500 rev/min/23kW for the largest.

C-axis resolution is 0.001 deg.

The patented spindles are manufactured in-house and are liquid-cooled.

The liquid passes continuously through a chiller unit and is used to keep the electrical cabinet cool also.

* Geo Kingsbury Machine Tools at MACH 2008, NEC, Birmingham, UK, April 21-25, Hall 5, Stand 5190.

CNC Projects and CNC Artwork is the focus of the final day, day seven, in Ivan Iron’s CNC Basics Learning E-Course. Video seven has been highly anticipated for release and now joins video’s 1-6 as a complete series in learning CNC Basics. The now completed series can be found at:  

The seventh and final video of the Learn CNC Basics E-Course takes viewers through some completed CNC Projects. Ivan’s goal is to show students of CNC the potential of what can come from using your creativity combined with CNC Technology. Video seven is a fun day that also includes some CNC Parts and CNC Art pieces that Ivan himself has created.  

Ivan does a good job of showing CNC Projects from all different types of CNC Machines. There are CNC Plasma, CNC Router, CNC Mill and CNC Lathe projects that are discussed. These pieces of CNC Art are anything from farm animals on the side of a bar to floor lamps that may sit in a living room.