Ninghai: This Company’s Five-axis Machining Center Is Awesome

Ninghai: This company’s five-axis machining center is awesome

I spent more than 10 million to buy a five-axis machining equipment, but just because one part broke, the entire production process was stopped for half a year. How should the return on this huge investment be calculated specifically?

A model of a sports car carved out of a piece of metal

In the lobby of Ninghai Kaibo CNC, there is a silver sports car model that is longer than the normal meter standard. The details of this model's windows, hood, tires, etc. all look very realistic, but people can't find any trace of seams after searching for a long time. The manufacturing method of this entire vehicle is actually a piece of equipment that is directly carved from a large piece of metal material. The production tool it relies on is a five-axis machining center.

A five-axis machining center, to put it bluntly, is actually a large three-dimensional engraving machine. It is able to process complex curved and multi-faceted parts at the same time. The development direction pursued by today's global manufacturing industry is to continuously break through the dimensional limitations of processing. From the original three-axis to the later five-axis, the requirements for accuracy in this process are getting higher and stricter.

Tens of millions of equipment have been shut down for half a year, forcing out demand

A few years ago, Ninghai's mold companies introduced five-axis equipment from abroad, and the price of one piece of equipment was more than 10 million yuan. After buying a company, the maintenance cost is very high. If a part breaks, the machine will be shut down for six months, and the production capacity will be wasted. How should it calculate this account? No matter how it is calculated, it will be a loss.

The pain points that customers have are actually potential business opportunities. As early as 2018, the company Kaibo CNC established a professional technical team of more than 40 people. The team is specifically targeting large five-axis machining center products with very high technical content and relatively large added value. They just made the machine tool one or two meters high. The purpose of this is to meet the demand for one-time molding of large automobile parts.

The bigger the machine tool, the more material it consumes

As the size of five-axis machine tools increases, the requirements for material rigidity will inevitably become higher. Since the cutting force and feed force of the tool head are extremely high when performing forming and engraving operations, if the rigidity of the machine tool is insufficient, the trajectory set in the program will inevitably deviate. After all, even an error of a few wires or a few tenths of a degree is enough to cause precision parts to be scrapped.

Kaibo CNC spent nearly two years repeatedly groping, and finally controlled the accuracy within 2 strands, which is actually equivalent to about two-sevenths of the thickness of a human hair. If this technical indicator is compared in the domestic five-axis equipment industry, its competitiveness is very strong, and this is also the core reason why customers are ultimately willing to place orders.

Last year, this model alone received 20 million orders

In the last year, the company Kaibo CNC received an order worth more than 20 million yuan for the specific thing of five-axis machining center, and the company's entire annual output value was almost close to the 300 million yuan mark. In the past three years, the average annual growth rate has remained above 10%. The growth rate and development momentum are extremely stable.

Internationally, five-axis linkage CNC technology is regarded as a symbol of the automation level of a country's production equipment. Kaibo CNC, from being at the forefront of the nationwide engraving and milling machine industry, has developed large-scale five-axis products, which has just stepped into the time window for domestic products to replace external products.

Operating thresholds are hidden costs

Five-axis equipment requires programming, and most three-axis operators cannot handle five-axis operations. Therefore, the employment threshold for enterprises has become higher, and training costs have also increased. This hidden expense is often the most easily overlooked by investors when calculating the return rate of five-axis equipment.

Last year, Kaibo CNC teamed up with Zhejiang University and the Ningbo Institute of Materials, Chinese Academy of Sciences to develop a simplified five-axis operating system. This system allows workers with only basic machine tool knowledge to operate the five-axis giant, directly reducing labor and training costs.

The new system will be put into field testing in the second half of this year

The research and development of the independent programming system has probably been completed at present. According to the plan, machine tools will be found for actual testing in the second half of 2026. By then, the troublesome operation will be greatly reduced, and the learning time for newly recruited workers can also be significantly shortened.

For investors, purchasing five-axis equipment is not just as simple as buying a machine, because whether the operating system can reduce labor costs and shorten the training cycle will directly affect the actual return on investment of the equipment, so this must not be missed.

Is your current company still using three-axis equipment? Regarding whether it is more cost-effective to replace five-axis equipment, or whether it is more cost-effective to insist on repairing existing three-axis equipment, everyone is welcome to communicate and discuss in the comment area. If you think this content is valuable, please give it a like and share it with others.