The Nanotech 250UPL has a compact footprint of only 1.3 square meters with double sliding doors on the upper enclosure for easy access to the cutting area. It incorporates a natural granite base structure with a passive air isolation system and high stiffness box-way hydrostatic oil bearing slide ways with linear motor drives. A groove-compensated air bearing work spindle provides motion accuracies of less than 50 nanometers throughout its 10,000 rpm speed range. The PC based control system Is powered by a Delta Tau Turbo PMAC2 motion controller with Windows 2000 front end & utilities. With a 1.0 nanometer programming resolution and unprecedented feedback resolution of only 0,034 nanometers, the Nanotech 250UPL is considered by many to be the most accurate diamond turning machine in the world.

This machine is based on the highly successful design of our 450UPL platform and includes independent hydrostatic oil bearing slide ways on X, Y, & Z linear axes with linear motor drives that provide dynamically stiff and well damped linear motions. Our athermalized spindle mounting technique. combined with a standard closed-loop chiller with temperature controlled water circulating around the motor and bearing journals,enhances the long term thermal stability of the 10,000 rpm groove-compensated air bearing work spindle. The Y-axis utilizes dual linear motor drives and a unique, adaptively controlled, step-compensated air bearing counterbalance assembly for optimal servo control of variable loads up to 38Kg. The work spindle is imbedded into the Y-axis carriage to improve overall loop stiffness, reduce Abbe error, and to provide further thermal stability during lengthy raster machining cycles.

The machine was developed with the latest "precision engineered" designs and components, including high stiffness hydrostatic oil bearing slide ways, state-of-the-art linear motor drives with sinusoidal drive amplifiers, and a 10,000 rpm heavy-duty groove compensated air bearing work spindle with liquid cooling for long term thermal stability. Due to the high overall loop stiffness and exceptional quality and technical performance of all major components used on the Nanotech 350UPL, this equipment has been optimized to provide superb cutting performance at significantly increased feed rates.

Optional B & C rotary axes allow simple expansion of the basic two axis lathe with up to 4 axes of continuous path motion. When fitted with C-axis motion control of the work spindle, toric, biconic, and freeform surfaces can also be machined "on-axis" via Slow Slide Servo (S3) machining. Our Slow Slide Servo capability is relatively inexpensive, allows sag depths on freeform structures of up to 16mm departure, drastically reduces processing times as compared to raster machining, and is very easy to setup and use. Surface finish & form accuracy results are comparable to those achieved on axisymmetric diamond turned components. Please see the attached movie clips for a demonstration of Slow Slide Servo (S3) machining of a freeform optical structure, or Tool Normal Machining with optional rotary B-axis.