Lathe or Mill?

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by John Haine on 05/10/2018 10:41:44:

I spent an interesting year with a Yorks based company making precision microwave components, many of which had cylindrical and coaxial cavities. Their extensive CNC machine shop was largely equipped with machining centres which were essentially milling machines. As I remember, the only lathe there was a little Unimat on a shelf for the very occasional non-critical job. I remarked to the manager at the time I was surprised, he said that the machining centres could do everything they needed.

I have turned components on my CNC mill, and if you look here there's a good description from a professional machinist of using a mill for turning.

Modern five-axis machines are not really lathes or mills, they have all the movements of both.

Neil

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Machine centres are something else. I found one for sale on the web and enjoyed reading about it having a run-out of better than 0.01mm 1 metre from the chuck, 5-axis CNC, a fully automatic tool-change carousel, and a swarf removal system. I imagined it might fit in my garage. Silly me: the first clue it was big came when I spotted it had an 8 HP coolant pump and that the swarf management system was rated to remove 200kg of swarf an hour…

Dave

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