High Energy Finishing

I've been familiar with vibratory and tumbling for decades, but only recently heard about centrifugal barrel finishing and disc machine finishing. Vastly improved processing time (10X) by comparison. Does anybody here use these types of machines? Are they as good as the marketing people say, or is there some unspoken downside? The price of the machines seems high unless a lot of volume is being processed. All the parts I deal with are very tiny and conventional vibratory seems to accomplish little, probably due to the low mass.

Hi Conrad,

I have a centrifugal disc machine that I bought some years ago used on ebay. I believe it was about an $8000.00 dollar machine I got pretty cheap. Was utterly shocked at how fast it worked, and went crazy tumbling everything. That's when I learned about the power of G-force. A part made of 304 stainless went from vibratory tumbling from about 48 hours down to 2 to 4 hours. The amount of energy that is available for finishing is incredible, but here's the rub: the amount of impingement will also greatly increase. I have one part that is almost a cube when it's finished made out of 6061 aluminum, and they get so beat up I'd have to do 6 parts at a time max, and turn the speed down to about 30%. Still had problems. Another 304 stainless part is essentially a rectangular "tower" about 0.450" x 0.650" with about a 0.300" bore through it. Couldn't figure out why the piston wouldn't fit in the bore after finishing: turns out it had enough energy to beat the bore egg-shaped.

Mine eventually wore out the lining, and I went back to a 2 cubic foot bowl. Almost all of my issues were resolved.

Not to say they don't have their place, but there probably is a reason the manufacturer doesn't make these anymore. They have concentrated on the barrel type, which has the advantage of fewer parts coming in contact with each other.

They work better for roundish parts rather than square parts, as the corners seem to do the most damage. You also want to run fewer parts than a bowl, to reduce the number of collisions. Since you're talking about tiny parts, I'd probably lean more towards the centrifugal barrel type, or possibly these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syAXO4RC7x4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1OXh26hogQ

PM me if you want to talk about it in more detail.

Take Care,

Burt

Yes, the barrel type intrigues me, as I'm quite sure my parts aren't suited to a disk machine. I'm more interested in putting a 4 or better finish on small instrument parts using rouge and walnut shells. I've seen the magnetic pin type, but I don't think they work with magnetic parts. Based on the fact that yours was the only response, I have to believe these are not common items in American shops. BTW, I also learned that they're called "Harperizers" from the name of one company that makes them.

Centrifugal disc finishing machine and centrifugal barrel finishing machines are high energy mass finishing machine. If your parts are small size or high value-added parts, then you can use these machines.

Centrifugal disc finishing machine easy to achieve automation. You can use centrifugal disc finishing machine in batch process. European company Rosler, Walther Trowal, also Inovatec Machinery from China have the automatic surface finishing model.


Centrifugal barrel finishing machine suitable for high value-added parts like medical implant and jewellery
The processing time is greatly reduced. But you need manual labour to prepare the process and before and after finishing.
Besides, centrifugal barrel finishing machine can not deal with big production volume.

But centrifugal disc finishing machine can deal with big volume for small and medium-size parts.
Centrifugal barrel finishing machine can deal with 1-2 pieces of big size parts with dividers between them
So that they will not get hit during the finishing process.

Earnest