TiAlŪ Sport Inc., Owosso, Michigan, has established its reputation by designing and manufacturing high quality engineered products for performance turbo charging systems. The company's product range includes wastegates, blowoff valves, turbo systems, turbochargers, turbo flanges, and accessories.

The company has added a 5-axis Okuma MU-400 vertical machining center with a 15,000-RPM spindle to handle contouring work for aluminum molds used to produce stainless steel investment castings for the company's product line. The Okuma MU-400 is also used to machine the castings themselves. "The simultaneous 5-axis capability allows us to produce complex, contoured part geometries that we simply couldn't produce using a 3-axis machine," said Greg Jones, TiAl Sport President. "We can access all sides of a mold, cut deep, straight walls and machine intersecting pins in a single setup, making more accurate cuts and improving overall machining efficiency."

For general machining, the MU-400 facilitates access to each workpiece surface so that all operations can be performed on the machine in one setup compared with the three or four setups that might be necessary without 5-axis capability.

TiAl Sport uses high speed machining techniques with small diameter cutters to help improve surface finish during production operations. The MU-400 is equipped with super-high NURBS allowing more uniform, more accurate cuts for this type of precision work. "We've found the new control system to be very fast. The MU-400 is a versatile machine that our operators find easy to use."