In order to realize the high-speed machining of the mold cavity and its related parts, the machine tool needs to have the following characteristics:

1. Since the molds are developing in the direction of large-scale, the molds of several tons to tens of tons are very common. Therefore, the machine tool table is required to bear a large weight, which requires the equipment to have the characteristics of large load-bearing and high rigidity, and must also have The table size and working stroke are large enough to accommodate it.

In addition, the strength and hardness of the mold material are high, and the mold cavity is often machined with a small diameter end mill with a large elongation, so chatter vibration is prone to occur during the machining process. In order to ensure the machining accuracy and surface quality of parts, high-speed machine tools used for mold manufacturing must have high dynamic and static stiffness to improve the positioning accuracy, tracking accuracy and vibration resistance of the machine tool.

2. High-speed and high-power high-speed machining is the development direction.

High-speed milling has shown great advantages in mold processing. In order to adapt to the machining of the mold cavity surface, the radius of the tool should be smaller than the radius of the small circle of the cavity surface Z, so as to avoid "interference" between the tool and the workpiece during the machining process. Due to the small diameter of the tool, the spindle speed is required to be very high. The spindle speed of foreign high-speed machining machine tools has reached 40,000-100,000 r/min, and the rapid feed rate can reach 30,000-60,000 min. The roughing and finishing of the cavity and other parts of the mold parts are often completed in one clamping of the workpiece, so the spindle power should be large. The spindle power of medium-sized mold milling machines and machining centers is often 10-40kW, and some are even higher.

3. Multi-axis linkage and good comprehensive cutting ability of deep hole cavity.

The mold cavity is mostly composed of complex spatial six-curved surfaces and grooves, and many molds have deep cavities. In order to achieve high-precision, high-speed and high-stability machining of 3D surfaces, the machine tool needs multi-axis linkage and has a good comprehensive cutting ability for deep-hole cavities. A five-axis linkage machining center can be used. In addition to the linear motion of three coordinates, there are also feed motions of two rotational coordinates. The milling head or worktable can perform continuous rotary feed with multi-axis linkage, which is suitable for machining mold parts with complex cavity surfaces.

It can be said that composite processing is one of the development directions of mold processing. Although the machining center has been able to combine many machining processes on one machine tool, it still cannot fully adapt to mold processing. It combines mechanical processing with different processing methods such as electricity, chemistry, and ultrasonic, and has more than two process characteristics. The composite processing will have broad prospects in the future mold manufacturing.