As gearheads we’re naturally attracted to machines and all things mechanical, right? Well for us there is no higher form of mechanical life form than the CNC mill. These things come in an array of sizes and capabilities. There was a time with a mill that worked on a two axis basis was cutting edge, then three, then five, and then we get to stuff like this which is so complex and hard to comprehend we can only sit and admire it. This is a WFL M60 MillTurn which is made in Austria and isn’t even the hardest core machine these guys make. How much does it cost? We can’t find those numbers but we did find a used one for sale for $400,000 and that thing had some miles on it. We’re guessing that new the cost is something along the line of “a lot more than $400,000”. You know, give or take.
The amazing thing about this deal (and maybe it isn’t amazing for you machinists out there that do this stuff for a living) is that this whole crank is machined in one operation. It takes the machine several hours to turn out the finished piece but in that time there is no operator that needs to reposition the crank, or do anything “for” the machine. It is all handled by the computerized brain. Now, that computer is only as good as the data it is fed so the crushing thing to think about is the programming process that probably took weeks and millions of lines of code to make all of this magic happen and happen in the way that you see it here.
We’d add a lot more to this piece by just shutting the hell up and telling you to press play below so that’s what we are going to do. This is wild and impressive and awesome.
Thanks to Darr Hawthorne for the tip on this one!
I can only image the amount of programming involved in making that crank.
used to work for one of the best made machines.
with today’s machines, doing cranks is butter. lot of machine tool makers have machines that do this and more. making a block out of a big block is really intense. a lot of programming for it. go to you tube and type something in. there probably is a video from one of the machine tool makers doing a demo or a real part. talk about speed of the machine. some machines have to be tied down now because they incur go/stop more than 1g.
figure out how fast over 3000 inches per minute is and then think how fast a 3′ move is. how about a blink of an eye.
Makes you wonder how they cut these accurately over 100 years ago.
To paraphrase something a sculptor once said, :You just cut away everything that isn’t a crankshaft.”
Is a crankshaft machined out of a billet cylinder any stronger than one machined out of a shaped forging?