Saving time with tangent plane machining

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Jongen Werkzeugtechnik GmbH

Ramada Acos

OPEN MIND Technologies AG

Open Mind was one of the first CAM producers to look intensively into five-axis processing with special milling tools. “This know-how influenced the development of the new 'tangent plane machining' strategy – a truly new CAM development with which time savings of up to 90% can be achieved in tangential plane machining,” Brambs adds.

Two central aspects enabled the enormous leap forward in efficiency: the new “tangent plane machining” CAM strategy and a new kind of milling tool. In order to guarantee the perfect interaction of both factors, Open Mind collaborated with the tool manufacturer Emuge-Franken. Together, the partners developed a new type of tool, the conical barrel-cutter. For the development of a new milling tool, the following approach was selected: all tools in barrel form use only a small portion of their circumference, a so-called circle segment. As a result, large radii can be realised.

The advantage of the barrel form is therefore the large tool radius, which enables substantially larger step-overs with the same theoretical surface roughness as with ball-cutters. For the conical barrel-cutter, the form was improved even further. This very compact tool is distinguished by an extremely large radius, which thus allows optimum angulation with regard to the surfaces.

Great potential lies in tool and mould making

A simple example demonstrates the possible uses of the tool: the conical barrel-cutter has a radius of 500 mm, which would correspond to a ball-cutter diameter of 1000 mm. It is immediately clear that such milling tasks cannot be realised with the conventional tools.

The advantages include:

• significantly reduced production times,

• particularly good surface qualities,

• longer tool service lifetimes,

• smaller number of tools.

Production firms can profit enormously from this, with the combination of a new CAM strategy and a new type of milling tool providing a new competitive advantage in production with tangent plane machining.

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