Spindles For High Speed Machining

A high speed spindle is the most fundamental component of a high speed machining process. The CNC tool machining center and other process components are all optimized around the goal of using the higher spindle speed productively. In more basic cases, just retrofitting a faster spindle to a conventional machining center can allow a shop to begin realizing some of high speed machining benefits.
Then the Four Spindle chucks comes out on it's way.Four-spindle chuckers can minimize part-loading delay. Spindles may be oriented horizontally or vertically.

Picture a High Speed Machining Center with pallet-changing capability. Workpieces can be machined on one pallet while another pallet located outside the machine is prepped for the next machining job. Essentially, the only machining delay occurs when the pallets shuttle to reverse their positions.

Now envision a lathe that has four spindles positioned in a square formation on an indexing carrier drum. The carrier drum functions in much the same way as an machine's pallet changer. It locates two of the four spindles within the lathe’s enclosed machining environment to allow turning of two workpieces. Meanwhile, the two spindles positioned outside the machining zone can be loaded manually or via gantry. When turning operations are completed on one pair of spindles, the carrier drum indexes the other two spindles loaded with fresh workpieces into the machining zone. As long as the cycle time for the turning operations is longer than the loading time, the only delay is the seconds it takes to index the spindle carrier drum.

For the right applications, four-spindle CNC chucks offer practically zero delay for part loading. That’s because two spindles can be loaded while the other two are making chips.




Each of the two spindles in the machining zone is served by its own turret or gang tools. Gang tooling is typically used for very high work volumes. The standard turret has 8 stations, while 10-station turrets allow as many as 5 positions to have live tooling. The decision to use live tooling should be based upon the amount of cycle time required for drilling, tapping and other such operations. If that time is a significant portion of the total cycle time, it may make more sense to perform non-turning operations on a mill.