Hurco to Debut New CNC Honing Capability at Motorsports Show

Hurco Companies, Inc. has chosen the Performance Racing Industry trade show, being held December 10 – 12 at the Indiana Convention Center, as the venue to unveil the company’s new CNC honing feature.

Engineers from Hurco and Bates Technologies worked together to implement stroke honing and air gauging for one of Hurco’s Fortune 500 customers earlier this year and the company is now offering this capability to other customers. The ability to expand the flexibility of the CNC machine to perform honing operations eliminates the need for dedicated CNC honing machines. The Hurco VMX42i will be used to demonstrate CNC honing. The VMX42i has XYZ travels of 42” x 24” x 24”, a dual-wound 12,000 RPM spindle that provides more torque at a lower base speed without requiring a gearbox, a wider table that extends across the entire Y-axis and moves completely forward in the work cube for easy operator access, and a 30-station swing-arm ATC.

Other demonstrations that are advantageous to the motorsports industry will be conducted by Hurco customers. Mast Motorsports will showcase head porting and head machining on the VMX42SWi, a 5-axis machine that utilizes a swivel head for the B-axis that has travels of +/-90° and a rotary table for the A-axis. The VMX42SWi has XYZ travels of 42” x 24” x 24”, a 12,000 RPM dual-wound Yaskawa spindle motor, fast 1,378 IPM rapid traverse rates (X and Y axes), larger linear rails that are wedge locked and mounted to a machined shoulder to increase rigidity, and a 40-station swing-arm automatic tool changer (ATC). The lead engineer from Mast Motorsports will be on-hand to answer questions about the demonstration.

Hurco and its IndyCar partner Carpenter Fisher Harman Racing (CFHR) will machine a damper part the race team manufactures at its Hurco CNC machine shop in Indianapolis on the TMM8i slant-bed lathe with live tooling. The lead machinist from CFHR will be on hand to answer questions about the demonstration. The TMM8i has a 2” bar capacity and an 8” chuck with a maximum turning diameter of 25” and maximum turning length of 79.4”. The fast servo turret is designed to provide fast and accurate tool indexes with the ability to use any combination of I.D. and O.D. toolholders. The C-axis programs to .001° and it is standard on the Hurco lathes with live tooling.

“The unique advantage of Hurco CNC machines is the flexibility of the control because it empowers the machinist to determine the most efficient way to program the part, whether it be CAD/CAM and industry standard NC, or conversational programming,” said a company spokesperson. “This type of flexibility is especially valuable for the racing industry because the machinist can program the part right at the control with conversational programming and rely on the sophisticated verification graphics to prove out the part before machining.”

Robbie Ott, Lead Machinist for CFHR, said, "I especially like using the Hurco when building prototypes. Just recently we built prototype damper parts. And like with most prototypes, we did not succeed the first time. Hurco gave us the flexibility to make modifications quickly and easily without starting from scratch."

Another IndyCar machinist Shane Sievers said the flexibility of the control makes the need for quick turnaround easy: “In a lot of ways, we are like a prototype shop. I will get a call when the team is on the racetrack and they will say they need a part tomorrow morning. Sometimes I have a print. Sometimes I sketch it out on a piece of paper. The Hurco control makes it easy to get the part from my head to the control. The Hurcos are made to handle that kind of quick turnaround and the need for flexibility.”

For more information contact:

Hurco Companies, Inc.

One Technology Way

P.O. Box 68180

Indianapolis, IN 46268

800-634-2416

info@hurco.com

www.hurco.com

Performance Racing Industry

www.performanceracing.com/tradeshow

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