Mag Giddings & Lewis’s VTC 3500 vertical turning center.
Like other builders, Mag Giddings & Lewis (www.giddings.com) has customers in the oil field equipment and power generation segments who are looking for flexibility in large machines. Plus, a lot more of these customers are job shops, as opposed to big production houses.
“When parts are large, shops don’t want to have to move or reposition them because of their sizes and weights, but more importantly, because of accuracy issues. It can be extremely difficult to accurately reposition a large part, so there has been a growing emphasis on attachments and special tooling,” Ken Campshure, director of sales at Giddings & Lewis, said.
He explained that on horizontal boring mills, for example, shops use right-angle heads to access part surfaces, and contouring heads provide turning operations. In addition, boring bars give added reach to do bores of different sizes and inline bores. Many shops also add rotary tables to better access parts. On vertical turning centers, Campshure said that live spindles, including right-angle live spindles, give shops multifunctional capabilities.
One of Giddings & Lewis’s popular big machines is its four-axis live-spindle vertical turning center, the VTC 3500, which features an 11.48-ft. table. The company now builds a version of the machine called the VTC 4500 that sports a 15.42-ft. swing.
