CNC Aluminum Machining

Aluminum is the most widely used non-ferrous metal. Because of its flexibility and adaptability, as well as its numerous alloys, has a range of industrial uses, including machining and tooling. It’s low cost and formability means that it’s ideal for prototyping, and its particular properties make it popular in all sorts of applications and products. Parts machined from aluminum are often less expensive because they can be machined in less time than many other metals such as steel and do not require additional finishes.

Aluminum comes in many different shapes and grades. The type of aluminum grade you choose ultimately depends on how you intend to use the metal. For details on all available solutions, you might want to read the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Rapid prototyping manufacturers often offer a bunch of processing options in regarding particular needs. For instance, we have 3D printing (additive manufacturing), Urethane casting (silicone molds) and rapid tooling for your unique request.

Oftentimes surface roughness has specific requirement, it should be lower than Ra0.2μm and the surface has to be mirror gloss. The normal SLS and other rapid prototyping processes cannot meet the requirements of surface quality. Besides, as an important optical component, reflectors’ precision is forcibly controlled within or below 0.05mm. With regard to machining aluminum reflector, CNC milling is the perfect option, its advantage is embodied in machining the parts with high precision, and the surface of CNC milled parts is high quality.

Taking the complex constructs into account, 5-axis CNC machine is yet to overcome the difficulties when working out the entire part. CNC programming engineers, who gained abundant experience in prototype lamp production, will carry out researches on the feasibility of machining after obtained the drawings of the design.

As for reflector, the significant optic surfaces will be milled by CNC process, but on the rear side, there are critical assemble structure which is hard to be machined by CNC milling since it will leave large radius on the corners. In order to progress, technicians need to make copper electrode and utilize EDM as an auxiliary machining process to help clear the corners. Usually this process will take lots of time.

This is a medical device panel for an Institute of Ultrasonic Instruments who specialize in the product development for Portable Color Doppler. The prototype project is the enclosure of the cloud backup portable ultrasound whose display has the 360 degrees rotation function. It is the innovation and progress for the medical device design of client’s R&D development.

To ensure the light weight and strength for protecting the high-tech electronic components, client had chosen the aluminum machining for the whole prototype model.

If you’re a fan of RC cars, then you must know there are many aluminum components in the RC car. Players tend to be keen on off-road race environments such as rock, which not only require extremely high speed, but also have extremely high requirements for the durability of body materials.

It means the higher speed requires the body material to be as light as possible, and the durability requires the material to be strong enough. Aluminum parts are the most widely used components in RC cars, including body, frame and wheel hub and so on.

In the industrial production of UAV/Drone and Robot parts, involves the problem such as material, process, cost, production volume. There are a lot of parts can't be mass production by utilize normal process, so you need to use some special process for small-scale processing accessories, may also involve manual processing link in the middle. In general, we mainly use CNC machining, silicone molding, rapid tooling and other technology to realize custom low volume production. This is a good way to time and cost, speed up product launch cycle.