Celebrating the power of five

In connection with the upcoming 50th anniversary celebration of Hurco Cos. scheduled for March 6 at the machine tool builder’s corporate headquarters in Indianapolis, I spoke with Michael Cope, the company’s product technical specialist. At the event, he will present a seminar about 5-axis machining, highlighting information from his book The Power of FIVE: The Definitive Guide to 5-Axis Machining. Here is an excerpt of our conversation; a longer version will appear in the Industry Briefs department of CTE’s April issue.

CTE: What was your motivation for writing the book?

Cope: I was in the process of getting a presentation ready for an annual program for machine shops, which was back in September. I was doing a bit of research to make sure that I was up to date with all the latest 5-axis topics that I wanted to cover and realized there are no books about 5-axis machining out there for machinists. There is one from Mastercam on 5-axis programming [Secrets of 5-Axis Machining by Karlo Apro from Industrial Press Inc.] but nothing for the guys on the shop floor to learn about the machine and so forth. I thought this might be a good time to take the information I’m putting together in this 1-hour seminar, expand on it, add a few other topics and put it all together into a book.

I tried to hit three different types of people with the book: those who know nothing about 5-axis machining, those who are doing it but want to learn more and those who’ve been doing it for a while. Especially for this last group, I get into some of the math that goes on in the background and so forth. That way they can get something out of the book as well. We’re sending the second edition to the printer this week. I’ve added some sections on measuring centerlines on the shop floor, as well as a lot of captions for the images.