Honing Products Produce Quality Finishes
Controlled-Force honing and the Flex-Hone tool.
Because I’ve written about the basics of honing and its types in a past column, I dug a little deeper into honing to find a couple newer articles on the topic, in case you missed them in our print publication.
A feature called Controlled-Force honing, which works in concert with a machine’s standard rate-feed system, is described in the article titled Tool Feed Technology Enhances Production Honing. It functions like cruise control to maintain the optimum cutting load on the honing abrasive throughout a cycle without regard to the incoming part’s hardness, geometry or size variation. Designed by Sunnen Products Co., this feature allows a machine to detect what is happening in the bore when the abrasive contacts it, whereas with feed rate alone, the machine feeds the tool per the program, not according to the real conditions the part is experiencing.
