Less than three years after opening doors in Orangeburg, SC, aba z&b USA Inc. is already making its mark on the US surface and profilegrinder market.

The company, headed by President Leonard Cody, is the US operation of aba z&b Schleiffmaschinen GmbH, based in Reutlingen, Germany. Its mission is the in-house rebuild and field service of existing machines, as well as new machine sales, installations, and spare parts fulfillment for aba z&cb grinders.

The company’s machines are used by a broad spectrum of American companies, including manufacturers of automotive torque converters, linear guide rails, heavy construction machinery, aircraft engines, oil pumps, compressor shafts, and other large components, as well as moldmaking and tool and diework producers.

In one installation, an aba z&b PSM creep-feed grinder has been installed to do deep- profile creep-feed grinding on cold-rolled and forged steel parts for undercarriage links on a large piece of earthmoving equipment.

Said to be one of the most powerful machines of its type in the world, it has a working length of 1000 mm, grinding width of 550 mm, and grinding height of 550 mm, but was readily integrated into a workcell at the customer’s location due to its traveling column design and small footprint.

An indexing worktable with two workpiece clamping fixtures allows simultaneous load/unload and grinding operations. Linear guideways and ballscrew drives control motion for the main X, Y, Z axes. The overall motion control of this giant grinder is performed by the Siemens Sinumerik 84OD CNC with digital drives and motors that allow free contour programming for interpolation- grinding applications.

“This single CNC-controlled grinder replaced a machine with three different processors and operating systems. The customer is realizing savings in setup, training, programming, and maintenance time,” Cody says.

“Between our support from aba z&b and that of Siemens, the time-toproduction on these workpieces has been significantly improved, as has the overall part quality and costreduction scenario,” Cody says.

The tale of the tape tells why. On this large capacity aba z&b creepfeed grinder, a 1750-mm diam worktable has two workpiece clamping fixtures, each with a qualified surface of 900 × 600 mm and maximum load capacity of 2000 kg.

The X-axis longitudinal movement of the wheelhead column is run by a Siemens CMC-controlled electromechanical drive system with stickslip-free high-precision linear guideways to guarantee the highest possible positioning and repeating accuracies.

The Y-axis vertical movement of the grinding wheelhead is performed by a variable AC motor and ballscrew, in antifriction guideways for accuracy even in small downfeed increments. The maximum achievable feed rate is 3000 mm/min. The Z-axis transversal movement of the wheelhead column is run by a Siemens digital AC servomotor package with resolution to 0.0001 mm.

The CNC itself features PC-based continuous path control, with an integrated Siemens Simatic S7 PLC and Safety-Integrated software for monitoring all feed rates and axis positions.