Turn-Mill Machining

A CNC turn-mill is a machine tool that resembles a horizontal or vertical lathe, but can perform milling, drilling, tapping and other operations using one or more milling spindles. A turning center having a turret with live tooling spindles in some of its stations is a simple example of a turn-mill. More sophisticated turn-mills have powerful B-axis milling spindles that can be oriented at a range of angles to machine complex geometries. Turn-mills offer the advantage of machining parts complete instead of running parts on multiple machines, especially those that offer a subspindle to enable backworking operations. Like a conventional turning center, bar feeders are commonly used to automatically supply bar stock to a turn-mill’s workzone to enable unattended or lights-out machining.