J&S Ultragrind boasts more power and flexibility

This not only offers multiple wheel spindles configured to suit customer requirements, but also provides more power, more accuracy and increased component weight handling. There is also a high degree of modularity in the way the machine can be configured from build, allowing customer specific machines to be manufactured quickly and easily. The UltraGrind CNC is designed for the precision production environment such as aerospace and higher volume manufacture including automotive, as well as high-precision sub-contract machining for biomedical, high-end process tool/die sets, F1 and motorsport engineering. Built on a one-piece bed design, the machine combines great rigidity, stability and stock removal rates, while maintaining high precision. It incorporates many mechanical, electrical and software features, suggested from the customer research, that ensure it is easier to operate and change over in demanding production environments. The modular wheelhead design supports wheel sizes up to 500 dia by 100 mm wide, wheel spindle power up to 15kW, with ultra rigid spindles providing substantially increased metal removal rates and increased productivity. Angular wheelhead positional accuracy and repeatability are assured via a high precision 1° Hirth coupling. With a optional true B axis programmable to 0.001° utilising feedback from a high accuracy encoder mounted directly to the rotational spindle axis, infinitely variable positional resolution can be achieved. The machine currently offers 650 mm or 1000 mm between centres (with larger machine length capacities planned) and centre heights of 180 mm, 200 mm and 250 mm. The increased diameter capacity (of up to 500 mm) means there are options to cater for larger mass components up to 450 kg, and odd shaped components, which can result in high rotational inertia. The UltraGrind machine uses a brand new Jones & Shipman's proprietary Windows® based graphical programming software suite, which further builds on the success of the Easy software that removes the requirement for operators to input code, although ISO programming is fully supported and codes can be easily viewed and used if that is the customers preference.