cnc milling machine rotary table free sample

The 4-axis CNC milling machine cutting the sample parts with ball endmill tools. The 3-axis machining center attach the rotary table for cutting the sample parts.

The 4-axis CNC milling machine cutting the sample parts with ball endmill tools. The 3-axis machining center attach the rotary table for cutting the sample parts.

Years ago, before I learned CNC, I owned a Phase II 8″ horizontal/vertical rotary table that I purchased from Kap Pullen’s Getmachinetools.com store. He has them at a good price, BTW, and he’s a darned nice fellow to deal with as well as being a frequent HSM contributor. Anyway, its a nice little table, but I hadn’t done a whole lot with it for quite a while after purchasing it. As is so often the case, one day, a project landed on my doorstep and I was glad to have it.

Before I could get started, however, I had to make some accessories for it. Basically, I needed some T-Nuts to fit the table, as well as a little fixture that makes it easy to hold a plate up off the table through a hole in the center so you can machine it. The latter, what I call a “plate machining fixture”, was inspired by something similar I saw the Widgitmaster of CNCZone fame using to make Dremel clamps for his mini-router:

I turned the round spigot using the 4-jaw on the lathe. I’m making the fixture out of MIC-6 aluminum plate, which is pre-ground very flat on the sides. This is a 5 inch by 3 inch piece. I’ve clamped it to the rotab using my T-nuts and the regular mill clamps and step blocks. It is sitting on parallels to make sure I don’t cut into the table. You can also see how I’ve clamped the rotary table to the mill table using a big cast iron V-block I have. You can never have to many blocks with precision faces hanging around!

Having a 4-jaw chuck on your rotary table is mighty handy! Because it’s a 4-jaw, you can dial in the workpiece by adjusting the jaws until it is perfectly concentric with the table’s axis of rotation. The best way is to make an adapter plate that attaches to the back of the chuck in the same way that your lathe does so you can exchange lathe tooling with the rotab. Here is an example:

For the example, the chuck is threaded onto the adaptor plate, and then the holes in the adapter plate’s flange are used to bolt down to T-nuts on the table.

In my case, I bought a 4-jaw from Shars brand new, and simply drilled some through-holes in the chuck to mount to the table directly without an adapter plate:

First, you want to make sure your part is properly centered on the table. To do that, I clamp the table down on the mill table (no special place is needed), put my Indicol indicator holder on the mill spindle, and find some round feature on the part to indicate on. For example, on the plate milling fixture above, indicate on the round boss, or on the center hole. Spin the table and bump the part in until spinning the table doesn’t move the indicator.

Second, locate the center of rotation directly under the mill spindle. You can simply use the X and Y table handwheels to do this. Use that Indicol to indicate off of a circular feature you want centered under the spindle. Turn the indicol around on the spindle and adjust the handwheels until the indicator stays put relative to the spindle position. A Blake Coaxial indicator will make this last even simpler.

When you’re rounding partially by cranking a part around on the rotary table, it’s really easy to go a little too far and screw things up. The answer is to drill the end points to make the exact stopping point on the rotab a lot less sensitive:

Centering with a Blake indicator is really fast, but what if you don’t have a Blake, or worse, what if your mill is too small to accomodate one? Here is a nice solution I found on a German site. This fellow has made an ER collect fixture for his rotary table, and has taken care that when installed on the table, the axis of the collet is aligned with the table’s axis. He can then place a dowel or other straight pin in the collet and line up until it will go into a similarly sized collet on the spindle. Nice trick! It’s similar to how Widgitmaster showed me to align a drill chuck on a QCTP to the lathe centerline with a dowel pin held in the lathe chuck.

With this extension, your CNC milling machine gets the 4th axis. That allows you, for example, to mill round parts or create engravings on rounded surfaces.

This rotary axis is made to order for us by a German precision mechanic. In this price segment, this rotation axis for CNC milling machines is unrivalled in Europe!

There are many rotary tables on the market. If possible, they have to be inexpensive. You can get a lot of them! Usefulness? That is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. For example, there are many CNC turntables with the cheapest belt transmission. The disadvantages are obvious: slippage due to the belt. If not in the belt drive itself, then on the load or idle side of the belt. Perhaps useful for engraving work. For milling, however, usually not or limited in the choice of material (aluminium 3D milling not possible).

Made with the highest quality made in Germany with high-precision, a ground worm drive and holding torque of over 20Nm using only high-quality components. That is the reason you can machine round parts with the lowest tolerances.

That means you can use the CNC router for 3D 360° machining in almost all materials. Even round engravings on Plexiglas are possible without any problems with this CNC accessory. That means for our CNC machine users: Round surface milling of plastic parts, wooden parts, aluminium parts or round parts made of brass, as well as engravings of all kinds.

Centroid OEM Machine Tool Manufactures offer a wide variety of Centroid CNC equipped machine tools.. click to to find a Centroid equipped CNC machine tools..

Small Milling Machine CNC Control system: $18,385M400 3 axis with 1Kw AC Brushless Yaskawa servo motors and drivesMedium Milling Machine CNC control system: $22,175M400 3 axis with 2Kw AC Brushless Yaskawa servo motors and drivesLarge Milling Machine CNC Control system: $25,760M400 3 axis with 4.4Kw AC Brushless Yaskawa servo motors and drives

Small Slant Bed Lathe CNC control system: $15,450T400 2 axis with 1Kw AC Brushless Yaskawa servo motors and drivesMedium Slant Bed Lathe CNC control system: $18,795T400 2 axis with 2.2Kw, 2.2kw w/brake AC Brushless Yaskawa servo motors and drivesLarge Slant Bed or VTL CNC control system: $21,597T400 2 axis with 4.4Kw, 4.4 Kw w brake AC Brushless Yaskawa servo motors and drives

Auto part set, Auto tool set, 3D contouring, 4th and 5th axis machining, Available in OEM configurations, Professional Installation with Service & Training and DIY CNC kits for both new machines and retrofit upgrades.

From the May issue of Modern Machine Shop Magazine " A CNC retrofit provides improved reliability and functionality compared to an older machine’s original control, and this is helpful in a number of ways. For example, a more intuitive control interface can help speed setups and minimize the chance for programming and/or setup mistakes, which could possibly damage or scrap a high-value work piece. Similarly, shops are also more confident in quoting work for large, expensive parts knowing the new control won’t hiccup partway through an operation and cause the part to be damaged. Shops also are better-positioned to take in “hot” jobs that require fast turnaround due to the retrofitted machine’s improved"... click here to see the complete article in PDF.

CENTROID Boss series II retrofit customer testimonial"The quality and workmanship of the CENTROID equipment was outstanding and very professional. CENTROID was able to custom tailor the control to allow us to continue to use our rotary milling arrangement as before and even expanded our capability. The short story is that we ended up with a four axis CNC mill for less than half the cost of the three axis Haas. This includes the work that was done by our staff."

Sherline has taken its P/N 3700 manual 4″ rotary table and applied a stepper motor mount with dampened coupling in place of the handwheel. The mount accepts a NEMA #23 frame-size stepper motor for CNC control. This allows the table to be used as a 4th axis with CNC systems that have the capability to drive a rotary axis.

The rotary tables can hold more weight when they are not under a continual load. Click on the Video tab above to see examples of different weights and uses for our rotary tables.

Sherline has taken its P/N 3700 manual 4″ rotary table and applied a stepper motor mount with dampened coupling in place of the handwheel. The mount accepts a NEMA #23 frame-size stepper motor for CNC control. This allows the table to be used as a 4th axis with CNC systems that have the capability to drive a rotary axis.

The rotary tables can hold more weight when they are not under a continual load. Click on the Video tab above to see examples of different weights and uses for our rotary tables.

A rotary table used in conjunction with a mill allows a machinist to produce virtually any part they can design. Sherline’s rotary table is a precision piece of equipment that has been designed to work with their vertical milling machines. However, it can be used on any mill whenever the small 4-inch size would be an advantage. The only limits are size, not complexity.

The table is 2″ high and 4″ (100mm) in diameter. The main components have been machined from solid bar stock steel, and the complete unit weighs seven pounds. The table has been engraved with a laser, giving sharp and precise lines every 5°, numbered every 15°. These lines are calibrated with the 72-tooth worm gear that is driven by the handwheel. The handwheel is divided into 50 parts, making each line on the handwheel 1/10°. This allows a circle to be divided into 3600 increments without interpolation. Seventy-two revolutions of the handwheel rotate the table one revolution.

The rotary tables can hold more weight when they are not under a continuous load. Click on the Video tab above to see examples of different weights and uses for our rotary tables.

The table T-slots are identical to those used on the Sherline mill and lathe, making the vast line of Sherline tooling available for use with this product. Two hold-down clamps and T-nuts are provided with the table. Also included is an adapter that allows Sherline’s 3- and 4-jaw chucks to be screwed directly to the rotary table. An optional right-angle attachment is available (P/N 3701) to mount the table in the vertical position to increase its versatility further. With the table mounted vertically, an optional adjustable right-angle tailstock (P/N 3702) can be mounted to the mill table. It is used to support and stabilize the other end of long work held in a chuck or otherwise attached to the rotary table.

Countless products today, from smartphones to supersonic jets, are made possible because of the reliability and versatility of CNC milling. It’s an ideal method for rapid prototyping, as well as volume manufacturing in plastic and metal. Let’s take a closer look at some of the remarkable advantages and applications for CNC milling.

CNC milling is a manufacturing process that uses a cutting tool mounted on a rotating spindle to selectively remove material from a block of raw substrate. The workpiece is rigidly mounted to a table, and this table moves or rotates on different planes so the tool can work at many angles. Sophisticated CNC milling machines can have 5 or more axes of independent motion to make more complex shapes or to avoid having to move the workpiece to a separate machine.

The axis of motion for a CNC milling machine are based on an X-Y-Z coordinate measuring system. All machinists refer to this when describing the basic movements of the mill, relative to an operator facing the machine. A standard CNC mill for example has three axes. The milling spindle represents the Z-axis, moving up and down. The X-axis is left-to-right, and the Y-axis is front-to-back.

All of these movements of CNC mills rely on Computer Numeric Control, which is a computer program derived from a 3D digital file of the desired finished part.

Early automated machine tools relied on punch cards to control their basic movements in a systematic fashion. This technology worked but it was a slow and cumbersome system and punch cards could not be modified once made. These were later replaced by magnetic tapes, disk drives and now fully digital instructions in G-Code.

This control system is not only fast and accurate but, unlike earlier systems, it can be easily modified as needed, line-by-line and in real time, in order to fine-tune the machining program for the best CNC milling results.

Making a finished part from a block of material requires many different tools, each of them performing a very specific CNC machining function. Changing these tools one at a time by hand would be prohibitively time-consuming and inefficient.

To counter this, CNC milling machines have rotating carousels where all the needed tools are pre-loaded on separate holders. When needed, these CNC milling and machining tools can be exchanged automatically on the spindle within a few seconds.

The carousel on this Haas VF-2SS mill can hold a maximum of 30 tools, plus one on the spindle. This guarantees that all conventional CNC milling operations can be performed in one set-up. We further improve on this efficiency by using an automated tool dispensing system from Guhring. With more than ten thousand cutters in storage we are always assured of having the right CNC machining tool for every milling and CNC turning job.

On a CNC machining center, the workpiece is mounted in a fixed position on a work table while the tool is moved around it. This is the fundamental difference from CNC turning on a lathe, where the workpiece spins while the tool remains stationary.

Because of this fundamental difference in motion, parts are held in place in very different ways on these two machines. In CNC turning, for example, all parts are mounted on a spindle. They are concentric and therefore held securely by a three-jaw chuck right down the centerline of the part, the same way every time. The same is not true for CNC milling, where different holding strategies are needed.

However, other unusual shapes or parts may require custom holding fixtures which can make a CNC machining project more complex and time consuming. We have designed several of our own which were later patented.

Symmetrical parts that are essentially round or radial are best machined on a CNC turning center for maximum efficiency and precision. But most parts we work with are not round or symmetrical so they must be machined on a mill.

The horizontal CNC milling machine is the same as the general horizontal milling machine, with the spindle axis parallel to the horizontal plane. In order to expand the processing range and expansion functions, horizontal CNC milling machines usually use the addition of CNC rotary table or universal CNC turntable to achieve 4, 5 coordinate processing. In this way, not only the continuous swivel profile on the side of the workpiece can be machined, but also the “four-sided machining” can be realized by changing the station through the turntable in one installation.

The mill rotary table is one of the main accessories of milling machine. As a precision work positioning device, it is widely used for indexing drilling, milling, circumferential cutting, boring, etc. The rotary turn table for milling machine is made from HT200 casting with high quality. It has already passed the ISO9001 quality system certification. They are are very popular on the market for their superior performance, excellent design and reasonable cost.

Both vertical and horizontal with two functions. Circle cutting, indexing drilling, milling and more complicated work are possible when the vertical position of the table is used together with the tail part.