Officials at Hurco introduce two high speed machining centers, the VMX24HSi (X, Y, and Z travels of 24”, 20”, 24”) and the VMX42HSi (X, Y, Z travels of 42”, 24", 24”). The Hurco VMXHSi mills are equipped with direct drive servos and other premium components to promote speed, accuracy, and repeatability. The integral spindle has an 18k base speed spindle and is equipped with ABEC-7 ceramic hybrid bearings to manage the thermal issues associated with High Speed Machining (HSM). The air-over-oil spindle lubrication distributes oil evenly and prevents bearings from grease starvation. The faster Automatic Tool Changer supports HSK tooling and has a chip-to-chip time of 4.5 seconds.
The Hurco HSi machining centers are built to last and to retain accuracy with larger linear rails that are mounted to a machined shoulder for increased rigidity. Additionally, the rails are wedge-locked to the frame to reduce vibration instead of the faster, cheaper face-milled process. The pre-loaded and stretched ball screws are also anchored at both ends.
While spindle speed, tooling, and machine rigidity are important aspects to the success of the HSM process, having a control that has the memory and processing power to handle the advanced tool paths generated by CAM systems is equally important. The Hurco integrated control is optimized for HSM with a 64-GB Solid State Drive, 2 GB of memory, a 2-GHz Dual Core Intel Processor, processing speed up to 2,277bps, and Dynamic Variable Look-Ahead capable of up to 10,000 blocks.
The Hurco VMX24HSi and VMX42HSi are the only high speed machining centers equipped with Hurco’s motion control system UltiMotion, which further reduces cycle time by as much as 35%. Since UltiMotion uses complex software algorithms for motion planning instead of conventional hardware, machine jerk is substantially reduced, which provides the added benefit of improved surface finish quality.