Sandvik has signed an agreement to acquire 67 percent of Chuzhou Yongpu Carbide Tools Co., Ltd, a China-based maker of solid round tools, with a call option to buy the remaining part in three years.
Vollmer of America has announced an Open House Celebration for its new facility in Findlay Township, Pa., scheduled for Oct. 22-23. Vollmer broke ground on May 11, 2019 at the new site, near Pittsburgh International Airport.
Solid-carbide round tools have seemingly been around forever; before them, high-speed steel (HSS) tools ruled the roost, and after them a growing selection of alternative processes like indexables, EDM, waterjet and now additive manufacturing emerged as competition.
Abrasive machining is a tried-and-true technology for meeting exacting tolerances and producing superior finishes. Manufacturers continue to develop new capabilities.
Swiss-style machine tools can be a good choice for making complex parts. On the downside, however, Swiss machining itself has a reputation of being complex—and, therefore, more difficult to master than standard machining.
Adaptive Milling. Dynamic Motion. hyperMILL. Profit Milling. VoluMill. Waveform machining. If you’re one of the lucky people who machines parts for a living, chances are about 50-50 that you’re using one of these or a comparable high-performance programming technology.
For machine shops in a competitive global marketplace, keeping spindles running and making product is the only way to stay in business. Still, adding a new piece of equipment, even with the promise of improving the efficiency of your existing ones, may be a difficult sell to management.
In a perfect CNC world, the first part is always a good one. There’s no need for extra blanks or barstock. Setup times are only as long as is needed to swap out a few tools and load a new program. There’s never a crash, never the need to reprogram an inefficient bit of code. The operator just pushes the green button and out pops a finished workpiece minutes or hours later.
For Dale Mickelson, Yasda product manager at Methods Machine Tools Inc. (Sudbury, MA) and author of several books on hard milling, tackling heat-resistant superalloys (HRSAs) requires the perfect combination of machine, workholding, tooling, tool paths and coolant.
So you’ve heard all sorts of good things about Swiss-style, sliding headstock CNC lathes and have been thinking about investing in one.
