HURCO VMX30DI JOINS NIKKEN INNOVATION CENTRE MACHINING CAPABILITIES

Opened in late 2015, The NIKKEN Innovation Centre (NICe) is a blueprint facility located at the heart of the Advanced Manufacturing Park (AMP). The park itself was established to provide a critical link between academia and industry to study and develop processes and solutions to solve the manufacturing industry's most challenging problems.

Located within arm's reach of the UK manufacturing research and development community, with world-leading companies and their facilities nearby, NICe offers a variety of capabilities to support the research and development of projects from their HQ in Japan as well as providing a unique proposition for European & Global customers with process optimisation, first artefact machining, cutting trials and more.

Key to this effort, and to ensure that they have all bases covered, NIKKEN has selected and installed a suite of evolving multi-axis machining centres to offer an accurate representation of the latest market solutions.

In line with this ethos, NIKKEN invested in a new Hurco VMX30Di offering 15,000RPM, 15kW direct drive spindle with face and taper contact, plus 762 x 508 x 610mm travels. Optimising the VMX30Di to its full potential, NIKKEN also installed their latest 4th Axis Rotary Table, the CNC260P, enabling manufacturers to rapidly increase productivity through fewer operations, reduced operator intervention and subsequently a reduction in material waste.




For over 30 years, NIKKEN rotary tables have been successfully deployed on Hurco machining centres adding versatile 4th and 5th-axis capabilities which can be used and removed, as required (when production demands require a larger machining envelope). This seamless 'plug and play' integration means that as soon as the Hurco machine is powered up, with the NIKKEN table connected, the WinMax controller recognises the additional axe(s) with conversational rotary programming being made available instantly to the user. In addition, NIKKEN provides a range of support tables and tailstocks that enable extended-length and multi-load components to be manufactured effectively. Such demands and work are not realistic through a trunnion-type machine.

Hurco features such as transform plane, DXF wrap and rotary engraving mean that 3+2 and 2.5D moves are easily generated, displaying the part and toolpath in high-resolution, rendered 3D graphics.

Whilst NIKKEN are renowned for offering unmatched high precision, high rigidity and durability from their Rotary Tables, they also provide a variety of other solutions within their portfolio to enhance manufacturing processes, such as NC Tooling Systems, Tool Presetters and Angular Heads.