Maximizing CNC spindle power usage in turning
Your CNC machine’s spindle is a gold mine, and you’re probably getting just 50 % of the gold from it. Fact: Most shop floors use only a small part of their CNC spindle power.
The good news
You can get ALL the gold, with zero additional investment – same cutting tools and work holding.
“If I load the spindle to its full capacity, its life will get reduced” is a common misconception. Just get rid of this, and start thinking that:
1. The machine’s spindle is designed to take a certain amount of load
2. Its life is not going to reduce if you load it to designed capacity
3. Your ROI is going to be poor if you do NOT load it to capacity
The bad news
I meant zero investment of money, not ‘No investment’. You just need to invest half an hour of your time understanding these:
– short term and continuous power ratings
– power-torque curves
– duty cycle and RMS power
This document explains these terms, and shows how you can play around with cutting parameters to maximize spindle power utilization.
By the way, CADEM CAPSturn CNC lathe programming software has a feature called Money maker that does all the calculation of CNC spindle power for you automatically, and enables you to maximize the spindle power usage with the correct cutting parameters.
It helps you reduce the cycle time drastically, in a few minutes. It suggests the maximum depth of cut that you can use for a selected tool, determines the available power and torque in an operation based on the diameters at which the operation is performed, and checks that these are not exceeded. It also shows you the machining time for each operation, total cycle time, cost of machining, sale price of scrap metal generated, and net machining cost. You actually do all this in 5 minutes, and increase your profits before loading the part on the machine.
