Product category:
General Machining Subcontracting Services
News Release from: Hemlock Engineering | Subject: Five-axis production
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 31 May 2007
Five-axis production of superbike
suspension
Hemlock Engineering's five-axis production centre at Stapleford, Nottingham has developed a radial foot component for the front forks of a superbike.
When a racing motorcycle development engineer walked into Hemlock Engineering's five-axis production centre at Stapleford, Nottingham with a rough scheme drawn on an A3 sheet of paper for a new style of radial foot component for the front forks of a new Superbike, it set in motion a totally new challenge for the company According to Hemlock's 3-D machining specialist Nick Marks: "What followed was a very intensive CAD to CAM component and process development cycle involving very intricate five-axis machining cycles
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 22 Jul 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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We even had to manually override the CAM system at the machine to create exactly what the customer required".
On paper, the left and right handed components were quite straight forward to machine out of a solid block of 7050 aluminium if a five-axis machine was available with good software in support.
This was available to Hemlock with its two Mikron XSM 600U high speed vertical machining centres with six pallets and Open Minds HyperMILL/HyperCAD GSM, SolidWorks and SolidCAM software.
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But, as the project developed, Nick Marks had to override the CAM program to create specified feed marks in certain directions, totally smooth areas, set key lines between the smooth blending areas of different profiles and totally avoid any indication of mismatch.
Said Nick Marks: "To produce the initial batch of 10 left hand and right hand components we pushed five-face machining technology to the limit".
The final method involved the use of 48 tools over three separate operations that took some three hours to produce each part.
Working with the customer alongside the screen and the machine for the initial setting up, the use of five-axes and the flexibility of the Heidenhain iTNC 30 control allowed Hemlock to create exactly what was required in physical appearance; geometric relationship of features and dimensions while avoiding the creation of any stress points.
And maintains Nick Marks: "When final measurements were taken, the machined component was within 0.1 per cent of the original solid model demonstrating the high repeatability of the machine and process.
Once the datum bore and a location dowel hole was set, the machining cycle included hogging out the form from solid using a depth of cut up to 3 mm.
The spindle of the Mikron was run at 30,000 revs/min and most feed rates were 24 m/min using standard tooling.
Further operations included face milling, axis interpolation to create the various contours and blends, drilling, boring, thread milling, roll tapping of smaller threads, the milling of several internal chambers and recesses that had breakthrough holes and slots and the final engraving of the customer's logo.
The general tolerance was 0.02 mm.
In the development of the process, keylines had to be milled and stepovers carefully tailored to accommodate specific sizes of feed marks in certain directions.
These were required adjacent to other areas having a highly polished machined finish.
Adds managing director Paul Cobb: "Because we have the full facility of CAD to CAM and two five-axis high speed machining centres, this capability is drawing in larger batch work on components in materials as diverse as titanium and aluminium from the medical and aerospace sectors.
We are also producing parts in these materials for the F1 and other autosport sectors but these batches of parts tend to be against very tight lead times.
As a result, we have just added a further two seats of MasterCAM software which means we have even greater flexibility and can now accept models for programming five-axis sequences from almost any CAD package.
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