Part quality can suffer if a machine tool cannot hold tolerances uniformly everywhere in its “working envelope,” the box-shaped region that defines a machine’s 3D reach when cutting.
The CNC Cookbook software developer recently polled its 100,000 newsletter subscribers to find out what they most value and most dislike about their CNCs.
Rebuilding a CNC machine tool is expensive, but the result is a machine that is as good as, and often better than, the original, according to this feature article by CTE Contributing Editor Kip Hanson.
When convertible spindles for Swiss-style CNC lathes were introduced a decade or so ago, many in the industry said they were only a fad. Yet those naysayers have been proven abundantly wrong, as headstocks that can be converted from sliding to fixed are becoming the norm on Swiss machines.
Why does INDEX afford itself the luxury of installing a second rotary encoder on the Z-axis in its lathes for full-surface machining? The answer is safety and accuracy—two unbeatable arguments that customers treasure.
