Vertical Machining Center
Vertical machining center is a highly developed machine tool that can deal with multiple types of milling tasks at once. At first, machine center is evolved from milling machines at the 1960s and since then, the development of this specific type of machine tools progresses well in the industry, and after that machine centers are widely applied in all kinds of industries, contributing a wide range of industrial efforts. Regarding milling, as its name tells, is the process of machining that utilizes spinning tools to remove materials by advancing a tool into one or several work pieces. This machining method could be done on different directions. Besides turning, milling covers a wide variety of various operations and ranges a wide scale from single tiny parts to heavy and large gang milling operation tasks. Similar to turning, milling is one of the most usually adopted machining methods that render accurate tolerances.
As a result, the research and development of milling method is highly popular in the industrial world due to its productive and effective nature for rendering work pieces with complex profiles which is comparatively hard to achieve by conventional turning lathes. With this expectation, the following development and the idea of machine centers are thus gradually formed. The phrase “machining center” can be used to describe a wide variety of CNC (Computer Numerical Control) drilling and milling machineries that are accommodated with several critical but sometimes optional accessories equipped together with the machine body itself, such as tool magazine, ATC (automatic tool changer), power tool turret, CMM (Coordinate Measuring Machine), multi-axis working tables, just to name a few.
Besides the model of vertical and horizontal, there are still other categories in the machining center inventory. Vertical machining center is the arrangement of its structure that aligns vertically, and the work pieces are machined by cutting tools that go up and down vertically. On the contrary, horizontal machining centers have the spindle arranged horizontally and the machining is conducted lying flat. With the vertical design, the weight of the work piece would help to make itself sternly located on the clamp for heavy vertical cutting route without much worry on route deviation. Furthermore, by the help of powered turret, the cycle time is thus shortened significantly. The work piece machining of machine centers are normally not of round shape but other complicated profiles since the former one can be dealt with by turning machine with power turret in a much more efficient way.
On the other hand, traditional machining centers are designed at least with three axes, namely, x, y, and z. Nowadays as the industrial processes get complicated due to the demands for less processes, there are machining centers designed with the 4th and even 5th axis to complete all the cutting tasks at on stop.
Regarding the 5 axis machining centers, there are mainly three types of construction methods that constitute a 5 axis machine. With the swing head alone that can achieve most processing angles, this kind of machines is considered convenient as well as other 4+1 and 3+2 machining centers, while the latter are with more practical advantages. There are plenty of machine center manufacturers in Taiwan who dedicated to the research and development in the industry, and offer optimal solutions for users all over the world.