China Top Machinetools

Comparison of the advantages of CNC lathes and conventional lathes

The advantages of CNC lathes and conventional lathes are compared mainly as follows.
1、Accuracy advantage

        Conventional lathes rely on gears and common screw-nut transmission. Due to the existence of gaps between each moving vice and the inaccuracy of manual operation, the repeat accuracy is lower. Conventional lathes need to stop and measure manually when measuring, and the measurement error is larger.

The CNC lathe relies on the drive motor to drive the ball screw drive. The ball screw has an interference amount after pre-stretching and installation, and the transmission has no clearance, and the accuracy is mainly ensured by the machine tool itself and the program. During the machining process, the position can be measured by encoder, which can compensate for the error caused by tool wear and other reasons. So the processing quality is good and the precision is stable.

2、Higher procurement cost

Of course CNC lathes have certain disadvantages in terms of procurement costs and single-piece production costs. The price of the CNC lathe with the same specification is more than 1.5 times of the conventional lathe.

3、Advantage of qualified rate

As conventional lathes are manually operated, human influence is very great, once the operator’s physical condition is poor or his mind is not concentrated, the product scrap rate will rise sharply. The CNC lathe basically relies on the equipment to ensure the processing accuracy, and the operator basically only plays the role of loading and unloading work pieces and switching, with little human influence, so the product qualification rate is relatively high.

4、Efficiency advantage of mass production

An conventional lathe requires a skilled operator. Due to the use of manual three-jaw chuck and the fact that measurement must be done manually after stopping, the processing efficiency is low. Under the premise of mass production and the use of hydraulic chucks or collet chucks to clamp workpieces, a worker who does not know any technology can operate at least two CNC lathes at the same time. The production efficiency is more than four times that of using an conventional lathe.

5、The cost of single-piece processing is currently higher

It is an indisputable fact that the current production cost of single-piece processing of CNC lathes is higher than that of conventional lathes. However, if it is improved, the cost and efficiency of CNC lathes in single-piece production will also be better than that of conventional lathes.


Post time: Jan-09-2023