Ordinary lathes are driven by gears and ordinary screw nuts. Due to the gap between each motion pair and the inaccurate manual operation, the repeatability is low. Ordinary lathes need to be stopped and measured manually, which has a large measurement error and low efficiency. It is suitable for small batches, low precision requirements, and zero-live parts. It has lower investment than CNC, but requires higher operating skills of workers, so the salary level is high. The scrap rate and productivity of low-level workers will give you headaches.
The CNC lathe relies on the stepping motor to drive the ball screw transmission. Since the ball screw can have interference, the transmission has no gap, and the accuracy is mainly guaranteed by the machine tool itself and the program. It can be automatically measured during processing, and can automatically compensate for tool wear and other errors. Therefore, the processing quality is good and the precision is stable. It is also possible to use the programming method to turn out parts with complex shapes that are difficult to process by ordinary lathes. It is suitable for parts with high precision, large batches and complex shapes. But small batches also work well. Its maintenance cost is higher than that of ordinary lathes.
