Metalmite was one of the first in the area to use the live tooling on the Mori Seiki lathes to hob spline teeth while turning the parts. Pictured here you can see that our Hob is part of the tooling on the turret and we waste no time in making you parts fast and efficiently! We have a video here to show you how we are doing this. We use Polygonal machining and gear technology to combine and make this happen. Also referred to as Polygon turning.
We discussed all the different methods we have for cutting gears and splines in this post last year. Click for more info.
Hobbing is a method by which a hob is used to cut teeth into a blank. The cutter and gear blank are rotated at the same time to transfer the profile of the hob onto the gear blank. The hob must make one revolution to create each tooth of the gear. Used very often for all sizes of production runs, but works best for medium to high.
Our Mori Seiki NL-2500 sub-spindle lathe with live tooling is really equivalent to four machines though. We were able to get the solid model of that part featured and find a way to turn the interior portion and then mill the outside to meet the customers needs. Each of the live pods on the Mori can turn at 6000 RPM’s to give us the power and finish we need to make our customer happy. This part was 304 stainless steel and needed to pass a micro finish inspection on certain portions as well.
We use Mori Seiki CNC Lathes with main spindle, programmable sub-spindle, live-tooling and Y axes. They are the ultimate in Multi-Tasking lathes. Talk about LEAN machine cells, these machines are like two CNC Lathes back-to-back with a full CNC Machining center mounted on top; all working together towards a common goal, your parts faster, better and cheaper. Raw material goes in and finished parts come out. This virtually eliminates all Non-Value-Added activity in the machining process. No need for multiple fixtures and fixturing, no wait time going from machine to machine, no Batch and Queuing just pure LEAN processing. Every activity performed is continuously moving your part closer to a more finished state. Only VALUE added activities goes into your parts.