PROCESS EQUIPMENT UPDATE
The
Why deburring, rounding and polishing are more than just necessary evils
PERFECT FINISH
F
or today’s manufacturers of precision components, there’s no getting around deburring, rounding and polishing. These production
steps are often seen as a necessary evil due to the high costs associated with them in some cases. Use of the right technology permits reliable processing at reduced costs. It’s practically impossible to
fully avoid the occurrence of burrs when using any of the traditional metalworking processes. Because these manufacturing or processing remnants represent a risk from both a functional and an ergonomic standpoint, they have to be removed. As was also the case in days of old, this is still frequently done manually. Quite apart from the fact that the necessary process reliability and reproducibility is not assured, this manual work results in high costs and often leads to time-consuming rework – in both cases at the expense of
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economic efficiency and the company’s competitive edge. And thus it’s no wonder that deburring, rounding and polishing are often regarded as a necessary and costly evil. More and more demanding
requirements for process reliability in production and product quality, as well as cost pressure associated with global competition, necessitate more economic efficiency for the manufacturing steps of deburring, rounding and polishing. At the same time, uniform high quality must be assured in a reproducible manner. Various processes have established themselves to this end, for example automated brush deburring, deburring with special tooling that is integrated into the machining centres, barrel finishing and high-pressure water jets. Many of these processes have been further developed in recent years, and new technologies have been introduced to the market as well.
Before and after TEM deburring, a microscopic view
Image credit: ATL Luhden
A NEW DIMENSION OF BARREL FINISHING Various developments such as drag finishing and so-called surf or stream finishing make reliable and economical lot processing by means of barrel finishing possible for parts that are sensitive to damage and could previously only be deburred, ground, polished or smoothed by means of a costly, non-reproducible manual procedure or at great expense with the help of a machine. In the case of drag finishing,
the parts are clamped to workpiece carriers that are then dragged through a barrel with abrasive particles or a polishing medium. Uniform flow of the abrasive particles or polishing medium around all sides of the workpieces results in effective but nevertheless gentle processing. Even in the case of workpieces with complex geometries, ideal, reproducible processing results of ‘handmade quality’ can be achieved
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