Screw-cutting: technical explanations

Other families of alternative techniques do exist, such as press working, moulding, ... but machining is a technique which allows the making of truly high precision parts and pieces.

Among machining technologies, we can mainly distinguish between milling (a technique which is also present within the Mustad company) and turning. Screw-cutting is, in fact, a type of turning oriented towards the series production of anything between several hundred and several million parts. The machines are fed bars of the raw material and the parts are made on the go or are screw-cut.

Benefits of the screw-cutting technique:

Screw-cutting is one of the techniques employed for the making of high precision mechanical components.

The precision of the screw-cut parts produced with modern screw-cutting lathes is close to 0.05 mm but may go as low as 0.01 mm if necessary.

When the precision required reaches a few microns or thousandths of a millimetre, screw-cut parts are ground or lapped in secondary operations (often after thermal treatment).

If resistance to corrosion or aesthetic reasons so require, at the end the parts undergo a surface treatment.

Mustad puts all its techniques at your service in order to supply you with economical and quality products.

At the beginning, screw-cutting was used to make precision screw-cut parts, but only simple, circular shapes which were made for the watch-making industry. Nevertheless, you will see on our site that the parts made with modern screw-cutting lathes are far more complex and increasingly resemble milled parts. Modern screw-cutting lathes are ultra-rapid numerical command equipment and have several spindles, several turrets bearing driven tools, each spindle and each turret being independently driven on a large number of axes.

Certain screw-cut parts could even be made by milling but for economic or technical reasons, the « screw-cut » version has been kept on.

Contrarily, sometimes, given the reduced power of driven tools on screw-cutting lathes, screw-cut parts are milled in secondary operations on machining centres.

Screw-cutting is one of the broad family of machining techniques. By machining, one is to understand the making of a piece or part by removing material.

Screw-cutting machines:

Screw-cutting may be broken down into several sub-technologies:

• CNC screw-cutting lathe with moving headstock
• CNC screw-cutting lathe with fixed headstock