TURNING

Turning/Lathe

With 12 turning machines at Machine Tech, lathe work is as common place as Aerospace Engineering and unique part builds for extensive projects that have the most demanding tolerance, to an energy project in North Dakota with gas well heads and pipeline infrastructure. Machine Tech provides the most consistent part-by-part tolerance that contract manufacturers from Atlanta to San Francisco look for, and offshore Louisiana clients demand. Our ability for turning and machine production, as well as mil spec or creating custom drawings has benefited many clients such as NASA, Halliburton, BLACKHAWK, Schlumberger, GE Oil and Gas, Weatherford, and Mustang Seal Solutions, giving us an edge over the competition.

Turning is a machining process in which a cutting tool, typically a non-rotary tool bit, describes a helical toolpath by moving more or less linearly while the workpiece rotates. The tool’s axes of movement may be literally a straight line, or they may be along some set of curves or angles, but they are essentially linear (in the nonmathematical sense). Usually the term “turning” is reserved for the generation of external surfaces by this cutting action, whereas this same essential cutting action when applied to internal surfaces (that is, holes, of one kind or another) is called “boring“. Thus the phrase “turning and boring” categorizes the larger family of (essentially similar) processes. The cutting of faces on the workpiece (that is, surfaces perpendicular to its rotating axis), whether with a turning or boring tool, is called “facing”, and may be lumped into either category as a subset.

The turning processes are typically carried out on a lathe, considered to be the oldest machine tools, and can be of four different types such as straight turning, taper turning, profiling or external grooving. Those types of turning processes can produce various shapes of materials such as straight, conical, curved, or grooved workpiece. In general, turning uses simple single-point cutting tools. Each group of workpiece materials has an optimum set of tools angles which have been developed through the years.

Wikipedia, 2015