On show for the first time at this year’s EMO exhibition is the latest wet blast innovation from Vapormatt, which will help tooling manufacturers improve productivity still further.
The company is the world’s leading manufacturer of wet blast technology and has developed a unique programmable gun crown, for use with its Tiger and Tiger+ systems. This increases the number of recipes that can be programmed for the edge preparation of tooling, enabling multiple tool sets to be honed and polished using the same in line system without the need to change gun heads for different blasting angles.
The programmable gun crown features eight Vapormatt blast nozzles, each fully adjustable to offer a range of processing angles. Being fully automated, they give engineers precise control over the K factors and edge radii required to increase tool life. This means that with a single gun crown, programmed via the HMI, a customer can hone and finish a range of different tools, each with different K factors and radii, without having to change gun angles for different recipes.
The crown is designed for reliability and repeatability with exceptionally high levels of accuracy. The crown assembly is manufactured from stainless steel, while a robust worm gear and cam mechanism, controlled by a servo motor, ensures that nozzles move in unison to deliver a blast stream that always achieves the desired angle with perfect precision. The HMI unit allows the servo motor to position the guns at any desired angle between 50 and 90 degrees, providing a range of different edge honing geometry for cutting inserts.
Tim Berry, Tooling Specialist at Vapormatt, comments, “The new programmable gun crown and latest Tiger systems are designed to help tooling manufacturers improve productivity, by providing exceptional levels of precision from self contained wet blasting, rinsing and drying systems.”
