Five-Axis Volumetric Compensation Updates Eases Adoption Pain Points when Mold Machining

Grob Systems developed its volumetric compensation cycle, Grob swivel axis calibration (GSC), for the company’s five-axis universal machines more than seven years ago. Where the industry standard is compensating the machines using four data points, Grob’s GSC feature enables it to compensate with more than 50 data points. This has enabled the company to more accurately map out any errors that exist, which has reportedly led to large advancements in volumetric accuracy.

Nevertheless, there were still challenges, one being the difficulty customers like mold builders faced to adopt GSC into their process, which meant removing workpieces from the machine to run the calibration. This also meant that the compensation couldn’t take into account the workpiece and fixture weight, as well as any thermal drift seen by the machine. To overcome this, Grob updated the compensation points by measuring a tooling ball permanently mounted in the machine. With this newest development, GSC Advanced, the cycle alone takes about two minutes to run and can be ran as often as desired using a simple macro call. For example, it can be run before final machining of complex cores or cavities in the mold, when cutting part geometry that requires critical blends along with parting lines cut to net zero to eliminate spotting.

Grob says feedback from its customers has been very positive and is quickly becoming widely adopted on new equipment orders.