What is a Barrel Tumbler Deburring Machine?
Barrel tumbler deburring machines have been around a long time. The basic principle hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. You put media of some sort in the barrel, add the workpieces and rotate the barrel so the media have a chance to remove the imperfections from the surface of the workpiece. It worked for metal spearheads. It still works for today’s complex machine parts.
There have been changes, of course. Tumblers have been semi-automated or even fully automated. To protect parts from impingement and damage, fixtures are sometimes used to hold the parts in place. But it’s still a matter of media on workpiece doing the important job of making sure parts work as they should when they’re part of the finished product.
Many variations on the barrel tumbler theme have been developed over the years to accommodate a wide range of deburring applications. For example, sometimes the tumbler is perforated and submerged in a tank full of an appropriate compound. The media and the parts are loaded into the tumbler and it’s turned in the compound. The slivers of metal and other contaminants flow out of the barrel tumbler through the perforations and settle out to the bottom of the tank.
Other variations have some interesting and quite descriptive names. There’s the bottlenecked tilting tumbler, the horizontal polygonal tumbler and the horizontal octagonal tumbler, to name a few.
Each of these types of barrel tumbler is appropriate for deburring different kinds of workpieces. It’s a testament to the proliferation of applications, as well as the effectiveness of its technology, that this ancient method has been able to be adapted to so may kinds of parts.
Barrel tumbler deburring machinery does its work well, not only because it’s able to bring media into contact with workpieces in a consistent way that leads to even deburring but also because it can do more than deburr. Deburring machines also can shape part edges – a process called “radiusing” – performing another function that is important for a wide range of deburring applications.
It is the barrel tumbler’s efficiency and effectiveness even in these times of increasingly tight tolerances and rigid specifications that have kept it solidly in the ranks of deburring equipment. It can do the work, ensuring that parts fit and operate as they should in the most demanding environments and products, from factory machinery to spaceships.
The future looks bright for tumblers, and their variety will most likely continue to expand as time goes on. This doesn’t mean that they’re the right deburring solution in every case, of course.