GBI Cincinnati Inc. (www.gbicincinnati.com) may well be a company to watch in the future.
The five-year-old firm recently announced that it will build a line of machine tools under the Revolution nameplate and control those machines with the MTI constant velocity control. The machines will be built in Michigan.
According to Kevin Bevan, president of GBI, the MTI control is 25 times more efficient than any control that exists in the world today. With a minimum block processing capability of 50,000 blocks per second in eight-axes simultaneous movement, the Revolution will process parts complete in half their cycle times without any alteration of a customer’s current part program because the machine operates at a constant velocity. The current industry average is 600 to 2,000 blocks per second in 3-axis applications.
The machine uses 80 internal high-speed buffers that continuously shuffle programming data through its proprietary software to optimize the control’s speed and efficiency for productivity gains of 100 percent or more.
The first Revolution model is the CV4020 vertical machining center that milled the Mercedes Test in excess of 200 ipm using the MTI control.
Carlo Miceli, president of Miceli Technologies, developed the MTI control and said it was based on concepts dramatically different from those of other CNCs. The MTI control has been available for several years, but this is the first time that it is being designated as standard equipment for a line of machines. Also, GBI plans to offer the control as a retrofit package for existing machines.
