Tim St. Martin knew there had to be a better way of fixturing parts on his company's 5-axis machine tools. "We'd visited some of our suppliers and saw how they were holding parts on their 5-axis machines," said the senior manager of manufacturing engineering for Carlsbad, Calif.-based orthopedic implant manufacturer Alphatec Spine Inc. "They were mounting the blanks into a 'picture frame' and then screwing that frame to a tombstone-mounted fixture. This basically limited access to one side of the workpiece per operation. Many in our company thought we should hold them the same way."
Imported from the CTE archive to seed discussion on MFGAxis.
Originally published on CTE: 2013-02-15
CTE source: https://ctemag.com/articles/finding-5-axis-solution/
Legacy path: /articles/finding-5-axis-solution