The machine design begins with a unique axis configuration—featuring no overhangs—and incorporates large castings that provide a robust cutting platform. It then integrates 8mm-fine pitch ballscrews as standard equipment, enabling the F3 machine to provide superior precision. Together these features reduce variability for hours of continuous, tight tolerance machining. The F3 offers positioning accuracies to within ±0.0015mm (±0.000060 inch) and repeatability of ±0.001mm (±0.000040 inch).

Included in the standard configuration of the F3 machine is a highly productive 20,000-rpm, HSK-63A spindle, which incorporates Makino’s core-cooling, under-race and jacket spindle temperature control system. The two-range spindle supplies unique, wide-range capability with the stiffness and rigidity at lower ranges for roughing operations, and vibration/chatter-free production of small details and fine features when utilizing small tools at high rpm.

The F3 utilizes the Makino Professional 6 control, which affords the perfect blend of a Windows Embedded Standard 7 operating system’s graphical user interface (GUI), touch-screen selection offering instant access to information literally at your fingertip, user-friendly, efficient PC-like capability for data management and editing, and the networking and storage capability of a data center.

Also featured in the F3 is Makino’s next-generation Super Geometric Intelligence (SGI.5) software—developed specifically for high-feedrate, tight-tolerance machining of complex, 3-D contoured shapes involving continuous tiny blocks of NC data—that ensures production rates faster than standard CNC systems while maintaining high accuracy. SGI.5 helps provide the lowest cycle times and costs achievable by reducing machining cycle times on dies, complex cavities and cores, and medical parts by as much as 40 percent when compared to most other control technologies.

The machine delivers positioning accuracies and repeatability in the microns, the spindle ensures capability to address a wide variety of tooling and machining applications, and SGI.5 provides unsurpassed accuracy and speed in tough, challenging, complex geometries. This platform is an ideal choice for shops looking to get top-shelf machining performance and superior machining results at a reasonable investment—a real value proposition.

The new F3 vertical machining center is designed to provide stiffness and rigidity for chatter-free cutting, agility for high speed/hardmilling and accuracies for tight-tolerance blends and matches typical of complex, 3-D contoured geometry associated with die/mold and medical production.

Standard Specifications