Application
Inside a CNC machine a cable carrier works harder than almost anywhere else: hot chips, pressurised coolant, high accelerations and millions of strokes a year. We supply the Tsubaki Kabelschlepp energy chain built for it — plastic with a cover strip for turning and milling machines, steel where chips come glowing off the tool.
On working days you receive a tailored quotation by email within 3 hours.
Chips landing at 500 °C on a plastic link burn straight in. Coolant emulsion creeps into every opening and attacks poorly chosen polymers. Add accelerations of 10 m/s² or more and a badly filled chain starts whipping, pushing cables against the side walls. The cause of failure is almost never the chain itself, but an open design in a chip-rich environment or a bend radius that is too small for the power cables inside.
For milling and machining centres with limited chip heat, an enclosed plastic chain with cover strip is enough: light, quiet and maintenance free. For lathes, heavy machining and machines where chips fall straight onto the carrier, choose steel — usually with a cover strip or roof-shaped cover so chips slide off and nothing stays behind. Keep semi-open designs with crossbars for the sheltered axis only, for instance behind a sheet-metal cover.
One carrier typically holds servo power cables, encoder cables, coolant hoses and an air line together. Separate power and signal with dividers, put hoses in the bottom layer and keep the fill level below 60%. Allow twelve to fifteen times the cable diameter as bend radius for shielded servo cables; at ten times you will not reach the cable's rated life at high cycle counts.
Above roughly 1.5 to 2 m unsupported length the carrier belongs in a guide trough, with the upper run gliding on the lower run. That limits sag, lowers noise and stops the chain slapping at the reversal point. We supply troughs in plastic and steel from the same series, including end connectors and driver brackets.
Every article shows inner dimensions, bend radius, weight per metre and STEP files for your CAD model. For a breakdown that has to be fixed today we ship stock items the same working day; for new builds or retrofits we calculate the axis and send a quotation with a bill of materials.
Send travel length, cable package and environment — chips, coolant, temperature — and on working days you receive a quotation with the right series, bend radius and length within three hours.
Know your travel, fill and bend radius? Calculate your cable carrier in two minutes in the configurator — or let us check it for you.
