You know who you are. You can’t stop flipping. You’ve mastered the technique and do it better than anybody on the planet. Fixture the part, machine it, remove it, FLIP it, and do it all over again and again and again…and again. Do you enjoy re-enacting the movie Ground Hog Day? OK, I know the tone is a little more snarky than usual. Let me find my “educator voice” again. Please allow me to suggest an alternative to flipping parts. Set up the part once and let the machine do your grunt work—uh—I mean flipping. All you need is a 5-axis machine to find the hidden profit of 5-sided machining. There’s a line from another entertaining flick—“Show Me the Money!”

Get ready: I’m going to show you the money. How much is 4 hours-8 minutes-23 seconds worth to you? If your shop rate is $80/hour, that would be about $320. Does $320 more margin for one part sound good? Let’s say you do 100 of these parts a week. Does $32,000 extra margin sound even better? And then there is the hidden cost of inaccuracy. You might be the most precise part flipper there is, but there is time involved in making sure you retain accuracy when you are flipping parts. With 5-sided machining, you fixture the part ONCE and machine five sides and then another setup to machine the sixth side.

So, how did I arrive at $32,000 additional margin by converting from a 3-axis machining center using the “flip method” to a 5-axis machining center using the method we call 5-sided machining (which is also called 3+2 by some people)? This is a real part, which was machined on a 3-axis VMC and 5-axis VMC.


Standard 3 Axis
Operation	Setup Time	Load Time	Cycle Time	Description
1	30 min	20 sec	3 min 58 sec	Drill top holes and C’bore
2	30 min	20 sec	0 min 42 sec	Facemill back side
3	30 min	20 sec	1 min 07 sec	Facemill front & mill pockt
4	30 min	20 sec	2 min 29 sec	Mill, drill & notch right side
5	30 min	20 sec	2 min 23 sec	Mill & drill left side
6	1 hr 30 min	20 sec	5 min 05 sec	Mill front angle, drill & C’bore – built fixture to cut angle
7	1 hr 30 min	20 sec	4 min 03 sec	Mill back angle – built fixture to cut angle
Total	5 hr 30 min	2 min 20 sec	19 min 47 sec


Hurco VM10U 5-axis
Operation	Setup Time	Load Time	Cycle Time	Description
1	30 min	20 sec	1 min 20 sec	Drill, C’bore top side
2	1hr	20 sec	11 min 44 sec	Complete the rest of the part
Total	1 hr 30 min	40 sec	13 min 04 sec

Time Savings	4 hrs	1 min 40 sec	6 min 43 sec

Show me the $ equation

Time Saved x Shop Rate x Part Quantity/Week
4 hrs 8 min 23 sec (time saved) x $80 (shop rate) = $320* x 100 (number of parts per week) = $32,000
*I rounded to an even 4 hours to keep it simple

If you want more detail, click here to see the video explanation by Michael Cope, Senior Applications Engineer. (You might need to scroll down to see video)