Schooled in Surface Grinding and Duplex Milling
A simple machine tool company visit yesterday exposed exciting advancements in surface grinding coming down the pike and duplex milling technology taking off in the American marketplace. For a solid two hours, I was schooled in CNC high-precision forming and surface grinders as well as plate milling and duplex milling machines.
A simple machine tool company visit yesterday exposed exciting advancements in surface grinding coming down the pike and duplex milling technology taking off in the American marketplace from Amada Machine Tools America, Inc.
For a solid two hours, I was schooled in the Meister CNC high-precision forming grinder, the Techster CNC precision surface grinder and the Winster CNC ultra high-precision forming grinder as well as the PMH plate milling machine and THV duplex milling machine.
I learned about some grinding technology developments coming our way--such as unattended surface grinding combined with inspection technology in an effort to remove the manual aspects of the process--and software's role in surface grinding with a brief discussion on work being done on inspection-free CAD/CAM.
Other technology that piqued my interest in terms of their possible benefits to those involved in mold manufacturing--moldmakers making their own blanks and steel suppliers greatly improving their processes with these fast justifying machines--include:
The THV 430 duplex milling machine: milling four sides of custom plate with THV Series, which is a specially designed twin-spindle milling machine. The automatic process to milling plate with a twin spindle milling machine is as follows: clamping the workpiece by the operator; milling the two surfaces with two cutters at one time automatically; after milling two surfaces, index table is automatically rotated 90 degrees; and then milling the two remaining surfaces automatically.
The PMH 1308 two face plate mill: milling top and bottom surface of custom plate with a specially designed vertical milling machine. When conventionally cutting a large plate with a smaller diameter cutter, multi-pass cutting is required increasing machining times, and the possibility of leaving ridges between the cutting tracks, requiring highly skilled programmers to run the machine. The PMH 1308 is equipped with a large 20.669" (525 mm) diameter cutter, which enables the one-pass cutting of up to 19.685" (500 mm) in width, eliminating the ridges that are made with cutting with the smaller diameter cutter.
