To provide the various machining materials with excellent quality and dimensional accuracy, high -speed machining is very useful tool as one of the most effective rapid manufacturing processes. However, high-speed machining is not suitable for micro scale thin-walled structures because of the lack of the structure stiffness to resist the cutting force.
A new method which is able to make a very thin-walled structure rapidly will be proposed in this paper. This method is composed two processes, high-speed machining and filling process. Strong workholding force comes out of the solidification of filling materials. Low-melting point metal alloys are used in order to minimize the thermal effect during phase change and to hold arbitrary shape thin-walled structures quickly during high-speed machining. To verify the usefulness of this method, we will show some applications, for examples thin-wall cylinders and hemispherical shells, and compare the experimental results to analyze the dimensional accuracy of typical parts of the structures.
