At Mach 2022, Guhring demonstrated a complete range of products that included threading, turning, drilling and milling tools — many of which received their UK exhibition premiere at the show. The performance of the tools was demonstrated ‘live’ on a Grob 5-axis machining centre.

With an extensive milling portfolio, Guhring gave a Mach show debut to the new RF100 Sharp Series of high-performance end mills that were put through their paces on the Grob machine. Designed to address the issue of machining soft, tough and high-alloyed materials that create an issue with swarf clearance, the new RF100 Sharp Series is the manufacturer’s sharpest solid carbide milling tool to date. Alongside the Sharp was the Diver Series of end mills that the company recently extended for micromachining with the new RF100 Micro Diver. Another crowd-pleaser was the RF100 5-Speed and RF100 7-Speed solid carbide end mills. Developed for the machining tough materials, the RF100 5-Speed and RF100 7-Speed solid carbide end mills are part of the highly dynamic Guhring Trochoidal Cutting (GTC) series.

String art is deceptively complex. It seems pretty simple: it is just thread wrapped around posts (usually nails) that makes a pattern, such as text, a shape, or an image. But the math behind making a string art image is extremely advanced, because the accuracy of the image comes from the density of overlapping strings and their angles. A talented artist can do that by hand, filling in areas as they go along. But building a machine to produce string art is a massive challenge, as demonstrated by Paul MH.

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As a leading manufacturer in the drilling and reaming arena, the exhibitor had its holemaking ranges performing on the Grob machining centre at Mach. With many of its drilling lines undertaking ‘live cutting’ demonstrations, it was the RT 100T solid carbide spiral flute deep-hole drills that captured the imagination of engineers at the show. The engineers were also busy at Mach discussing the scope of special tooling solutions that can be designed, developed, manufactured and trialled at the company’s facility in Birmingham.

Paul initially developed a mechanism similar to what you'd see on a nail gun, with a hopper on the moving machine head that fed nails to an end effector. But that was unreliable and also required the machine to carry around the full weight of all the nails, which could number in the hundreds. That weight made the machine slow, so Paul devised another remote mechanism to feed nails for the end effector to pick up. That was still unreliable, so it required a webcam with a neural network that visually checks to see if a nail is present.

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Commenting upon the exhibition, Guhring UK Managing Director, Chris Weston said: “It was the first time for Guhring to have a machining centre on the Mach stand to demonstrate products, and it worked extremely well. We had a crowd around the machine all week, paying close attention to the jaw-dropping performance of our tools. We are also delighted to announce that our cooperation with Grob at Mach was just the first step in a long-term partnership that has now seen Guhring UK take the impressive 5-axis machine that straddled both stands at Mach straight to the Guhring technical centre in Birmingham. Arriving at Guhring UK immediately after the show, the machine will cement our relationship and enable us to provide comprehensive demonstrations of our product lines on an extremely capable 5-axis machining centre. It will also serve as a facility for Grob to invite its customers to undertake machining trials.”

In this video, Paul walks viewers through his journey to develop a string art machine from scratch. That came with numerous hurdles to clear and the mechanism to insert nails is a perfect example. The machine itself is Cartesian, with linear X and Y axes very similar to a CNC router. It operates under the control of a RAMPS 1.4 board, which is common for machines of this style. But grabbing nails and sliding them into the picture's base (foam board) was not a trivial task.

The software was Paul's most impressive feat. Using the dark magic that is mathematics, it takes a photo as input and calculates the thread paths that would create the best visual approximation. It is a little bit like dithering a monochrome picture, but far more complicated. The software then generates g-code for the machine to follow so that it can wrap thread around the nails in the proper order while avoiding collisions.

This machine also required a way to feed thread, which was actually the easiest part of the project. The thread comes off the spool through a PTFE tube out of a "nozzle" on the end effector. After attaching the thread to the first nail, the tension is enough to keep unspooling the thread as necessary.

We're only scratching the surface of the work that went into this machine, so be sure to watch the full video to see how Paul made this all come together.

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