LIBRARIES Design of an Automated On-Car Brake Lathe

An on-car brake lathe resurfaces disk-brake rotors by rotating them "in place " and making a light cut along the surface of the disk. The primary goal of this thesis is to develop an automated cutting head for an on-car brake lathe. The new cutting head must produce a surface finish that matches or exceeds that of the current (manual) cutting head. Pro-Cut International, a leading manufacturer of on-car brake lathes, developed functional requirements and cost constraints for the automated cutting head. Technical challenges include design and fabrication of low-cost precision linear bearings and actuators with dynamic stiffness sufficient to suppress chatter. During this thesis, two prototype cutting heads were designed, manufactured, and tested. The first prototype employed modular linear bearings, and produced unac-ceptable surface finish due to chatter. Cutting-tip vibration measurements combined with modal testing showed that chatter was caused by low structural stiffness of the modular bearing rails