Klingelnberg C 50 Bevel Gear Cutting Machine

The Klingelnberg C 50 is an Oerlikon bevel gear cutting machine — a six-axis CNC machine that cuts dry, without cutting oil in the process. It is not a cylindrical gear grinder. It produces the tooth form on bevel gear blanks, and the range of application published for it is unusually broad for a single machine: continuous indexing, single indexing, and straight bevel gearing are all covered on the same platform.

That three-process capability is the C 50's defining characteristic. Continuous indexing (face hobbing) and single indexing (face milling) are normally split across separate machines because the kinematics differ, and straight bevel gearing is often a third machine again. Running all three means a shop can take mixed bevel work — different customers, different tooth systems — without routing jobs to different assets. The module range reflects the split: 1.5–9 mm in continuous indexing, extending to 1.5–11 mm in single indexing.

The working envelope runs to 500 mm workpiece diameter with a maximum tooth width of 90 mm, tooth counts from 6 to 180, spiral angles from 0° to 60°, and gear ratios from 1:1 to 1:10. Cutter heads from 88 to 181 mm (6–16 in) diameter mount on a Gleason outer cone No. 14 spindle seat (1:24 taper, 58.227 mm diameter), carrying 5 to 19 blade groups in continuous indexing. Both the cutter head spindle and the workpiece spindle run to a maximum of 450 rpm. The workpiece spindle uses an Oerlikon inner cone No. 80 seat (1:16 taper, 203.218 mm diameter) with a 190 mm spindle opening.

Dry cutting removes the cutting oil system, its filtration, and the swarf-degreasing step that follows an oil-cut process, but it moves that burden to air: chips and dust have to be extracted. The published total connected load of 50 kVA is quoted without the filter system, so the filtration unit is a separate line item in both the electrical and the floor-space budget. The machine itself weighs approximately 33,500 kg net and occupies roughly 4,860 x 3,300 x 3,350 mm without integrated workpiece loading.

In the gear process chain the C 50 performs soft cutting, ahead of carburizing or case hardening and any subsequent hard finishing. Its accuracy determines how much stock is left for the grinder and how evenly that stock sits across the flanks, which is why cutting quality upstream governs grinding cycle time downstream.