Abrasive Cutting of Multiple Steel Bars – Aerospace Fasteners | Tridex CS1-A
Challenge
Conventional cutting processes, including abrasive chop saws, band saws, lathe cutoff, and shear cutting machines, each carry inherent disadvantages. Tooling wears out quickly in all of these methods, driving up replacement costs and increasing overall production costs.
Manufacturing aerospace fasteners presents significant cutting challenges that conventional equipment struggles to address effectively. Many traditional methods require cutting oil, which is expensive, messy, and creates a hazardous work environment. Band saws produce rough surface finishes and inconsistent length tolerances, necessitating secondary processing that adds time and cost. Cutting bars individually on a lathe is slow and low-output, and the width of lathe cutoff tools wastes expensive material, driving up the cost per cut. Carbide tooling wears quickly, leaving increasingly large burrs as the tool degrades. Shear cutting is fast but extremely loud and leaves deformed ends that require additional finishing. Conventional saws compound these issues with excessive noise and minimal safety features.
Process
The Tridex CS1-A Precision Abrasive Cutoff Machine delivers superb accuracy and multiple-bar cutting capability, processing several bars simultaneously to increase overall throughput. Thin cutoff wheels ranging from 0.025 to 0.045 inches minimize kerf loss and reduce tooling costs, while water-based coolant eliminates the expense and mess of cutting oil. The CS1-A consistently holds length tolerances of +/- 0.001 inches on most cuts, producing a typical surface finish of 0.4 to 0.8 Ra. Burr is minimal and remains consistent throughout the blade’s life, reducing the need for downstream deburring.
The machine’s simple color touchscreen HMI makes setup, loading, and operation straightforward for any trained operator. An enclosed stainless steel work area provides a clean, safe environment that meets CE and ISO 13849 machine safety standards, with sound levels below 80 dB during the cutting cycle.
Contact an EngineerSolution: Tridex CS1-A Precision Abrasive Cutoff Machine
The Tridex CS1-A Precision Abrasive Cutoff Machine provides fast, clean cuts with minimal burrs. Its robust design uses high-precision, CNC-grade components for superior accuracy when cutting solid bars and tubes. The CS1-A is well suited for a wide range of demanding materials and applications, including stainless steel and nickel alloy forging blanks, hardened tool steel rod, tungsten and molybdenum rod, rubber and metal extrusions, PEEK and PEEK-Sil™ tube, dental alloys, ceramics, and ferromagnetic alloys.
