Now You Can Turn-Cut on a MULTUS Machine Tool (Video)

At IMTS 2016, and at our recent Technology Showcase event, I had the pleasure of demonstrating a new function for Okuma’s MULTUS-style machine tools: Turn-Cut. This technology has been available for several years on our milling machines and now we’re unveiling it for the first time with a demo on a MULTUS U3000. Watch the video and you can see Turn-Cut making I.D. and O.D. cuts on a sample part we created.

Turn-Cut: Basic Operation

The way Turn-Cut typically works is, when you’re on a lathe you’re rotating the part, and the tool is stationary while you’re turning, basically in lathe mode. Turn-Cut locks the part in, it doesn’t rotate the part. It takes a tool in the milling spindle and it syncs the rotation of the tool with the XYZ rotating around to form a circular motion with the tool rotating in the turret moving in the three axes to generate the turning process. That’s why we call it Turn-Cut.

What Do You Do With It?

What Turn-Cut allows you to do is - there might be a feature on a part that has some type of critical tolerance, maybe a seal area. The operator doesn’t want to do a milling process because of the way the feed marks on the mill appear on the part for a sealed area and make a seal leak. So they like things done in a turning process. The finish is different and creates a better sealing area. It’s also useful in situations where you need to do a lot of heavy milling.

A Popular Part

The demo was a hit at the shows this year, not only for the interesting process it showed, but folks also really liked the part. So I thought I’d show that to you here:

Using Turn-Cut on a MULTUS is a good fit for aerospace applications, or valve body type work, where you have multiple ports coming in at different angles. Take a look at the video and let me know what you think.

Kevin Kraieski is Senior Application Engineer, Okuma America Corporation.