Hurco unveils most important product development for 22 years

WinMax will span the entire Hurco product line of machining and turning centers as the company's standard control when it is released in early 2007. WinMax is the most significant product introduction since Hurco launched its user-friendly dual screen graphical control 22 years ago (pictured). WinMax provides the highest level of shopfloor flexibility and software productivity tools for customers using NC or Conversational programming formats, says the company. Reduced key strokes, touch screen navigation, and interactive solid rendering of graphics, promote process improvements through software application automation that will allow Hurco customers to realise time savings. The new WinMax Control software with solid rendering graphical programming will be released with five new software productivity packages and hundreds of Windows-related enhancements. It will run on a high performance hardware platform including 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium processor (CPU), 2.0 GB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, and has a USB port. Additionally, a high-speed video card for dual color touch screen LCD panels will be standard on all VMX Power of Two (VMX2) packages. One of the new package features provides the flexibility of merging NC and Conversational program segments. In addition to WinMax, Hurco introduced several new machine models including a swivel-head 5-axis machine (VMX42SR) designed with a smaller footprint. The VMX42SR will be released with specially developed software and graphics to support 5-axis simultaneous and greatly simplified 5-sided machine programming. Hurco also demonstrated one of the two new TMM slant-bed lathe models with live tooling (TMM8) embedded with high performance WinMax touch-screen turning graphic simulations. Hurco will also launch the TMM10 slant-bed lathe with live tooling that has a 10" three-jaw chuck. Enhancements were also released for the VMX Power of Two (VMX²) packages and the VM models, these include increases in spindle speeds, greater capacity automatic tool changers, and faster rapid traverse.