Five-axis manufacturing techniques have long been used in the aerospace and power generation fields. This may be due to component geometry as found in gas turbine engines or automotive turbochargers, or complex and critical components such as landing gear on an aircraft. Or it may be an artifact of new computer-aided designs that use monolithic structural components that had previously been an assembly of welded sheet metal. The component produced with five-axis machining reduces the number of part numbers in the customer’s product and the assembly labor to produce the finished product. In aerospace, the engineering components requiring five-axis machining often have a lower weight, which is a critical performance criteria. Unrelated to actual manufacturing cost, these all improve product performance and economics.
But the moldmaking world has not had the same incentives to invest in five-axis technology and it lags behind their aerospace manufacturing brethren. In moldmaking, the shapes may not be as complex as in an aircraft engine (allowing easy extraction from the mold), weight is not a critical factor, and component production quantities do not reward productivity gains as they do in serial aerospace production. Yet there are still many reasons for moldmakers to adopt five-axis machining. Traditionally, five-axis machining offers one or more of the following benefits:
Reduce setups and increase quality for multi-side machining
Provide access to complex geometry
Allow shorter tooling or tapered cutters that can be tilted away from steep-walled surfaces
A side benefit of the improved tooling is that small fillet radii near steep walled surfaces that may be difficult to machine with three-axis and that may have required a supplemental EDM process, can now be machined on one machine—and with one setup—by implementing five-axis technology.
Situations like this begin to draw a picture that five-axis milling can be economical in broader applications. In the previous examples, many part numbers (structural example) that impact drafting, PLM, assembly and quality disciplines, in addition to manufacturing; and, many process steps (steep wall example) that come from additional machine setup, additional fixturing, zero-point referencing and additional technology steps (possibly through outsourcing) for EDM were saved.
Today’s competitive market requires shorter cycle times and emphasizes smaller outsource vendor pools. Each supplier must thus become vital by being able to supply both standard and complex parts.
American business has much shorter time windows than European or Japanese companies. This focus on balance sheets and quarterly reports to stock markets and analysts may have a negative impact with regard to capital investments.
But you no longer need to be an early adapter to implement five-axis technology. The key components to a five-axis system include a milling machine, CNC controller (supplied with the machine), cutters and holders and CAM software (including postprocessor and simulation). Nearly even machine shop today has CNC equipment and probably has a broad understanding of most of these technologies today.                     

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