C&B MACHINERY reported its clamp bore face-grinding machines have been redesigned and the latest model is now available, the CBVR-2F-2S clamp bore grinder. Clamp bore face-grinding machines are specially designed to generate tighter squareness/perpendicularity tolerances for high-precision face grinding applications.
After numerous discussions with customers, C&B embarked on the challenge of updating the design, a process that took about a year with multiple redesigns throughout the process. Collaboration between sales, engineering, and service engineers helped to achieve the final design.
“Listening to our customers was the main push for us, but we also listened to our service engineers. We consider our customers our partners. We want honest feedback from them. They live with our machinery every day. We asked them what improvements would help them the most with uptime, maintenance, and overall production. We took the feedback from our customers and our service engineers and made the necessary improvements,” recalled C&B Machinery president Bill Tulpa,
According to the supplier, its redesigned machines have a simplified, overall design and offer shorter cycle times, with reduced downtime. Also, they require fewer spare parts and achieve less swarf build-up, and provide easier access for maintenance.
Standard clamp bore face-grinding machine design includes a gantry system that requires a large number of parts. All of these parts were located in the interior of the machine, making servicing difficult, as the space to work was very tight. The C&B Engineering Team worked to improve our workholding tooling and remove the gantry.
The core components of the machine stayed the same. The designers repositioned the spindle columns to replace the gantry mechanism – a change that allowed for several components to be removed, making the machine more open and maintenance-friendly.
The new design also includes a Fanuc robot within the machine, for positioning parts. Also, the part handling area of the machine is simpler than in previous models. This is an area where many of our service calls occurred. The new design fixes the issue before it happens.
After testing multiple design concepts, the new design will be put into production in the very near future and multiple machines are being manufactured. This machine design allows users easier access to the spindles, gauges, and work holding than previous models. It also provides better coolant flow and minimizes areas for swarf buildup.
Learn more at www.cbmachinery.com.
