What you’re looking at here is our topic for today. We’re referring to the 5-axis machining, which you can see in the sample aircraft airframe part on the left, and on the right is an automated setup with a pallet management system.

The idea is to put these two production advantages together to give you a flexible, simple, highly productive method of producing parts. In this particular case, we’re talking about processing the parts across a 5-axis horizontal machining center.

The advantage of horizontal machining centers is that you have better chip management and coolant management system to run longer hours, unattended, without having to intervene with cleaning up the machine and things like that.

What we’re going to illustrate here is setting up parts onto standardized sub-pallets outside the cell. The advantage of this is that the machine and cell can always be producing parts, never stopping, while new parts are being set up.

We’re running nonstop by using a pallet-magazine approach. We’re going to show you a video in a bit to illustrate an automated 5-axis cell. The video will show a process of accomplishing 5-axis machining in a way that’s simple and actually being done in the real world. You can see how the customer is benefiting and how they are running parts every day.

This type of automation works for a lot of one or lots of thousands, which is really the highlight of the flexibility of the system. Many people are running smaller lots and higher mixes of parts, which demonstrates how you can use this type of setup to run lots as they are needed.

What we’re going to show in the video is a micro-MMC. It presents Makino technologies, although I want you to look at it to see how a 5-axis horizontal machining cell can be integrated with a robot-loading system and palletizing system.

One interesting thing you’ll see is that the robot utilizes a single, standard gripper. This is important because using a standard gripper allows us to be much more flexible. Parts are loaded on the sub-pallets, so there’s no reason to use different grippers for different parts, since all parts can be put on the same standard sub-pallet, adding to the simplicity of the system.

This type of a system can be created as a more or less stand-alone machine that’s highly automated, or it can be run as a multi-machine, multi-pallet configuration where you would use a cell controller. If it’s a stand-alone or single-machine operation, it can all be controlled from the machine controller.

Externally worksetting station is an important aspect of the setup. As you look at the picture, you can see the curved surface, which is the worksetting station. The machine can be running and producing parts at all times while an operation is loading new parts or taking out finished parts.

Pallet stockers you’ll see much better in the video, but there can be any variety of configurations of this. The unique feature of this system is that the pallet stockers are in more of a vertical orientation, taking up very little space. So you have a highly automated, very productive system that is taking up limited floor space.

I mentioned horizontals are great for chip and coolant management, but they’re also great for the pallet-stocker side of this system. This can help direct coolant, simply using gravity, to manage coolant left on the part and return that to the coolant sump, so you don’t waste a lot of coolant.