b'hobbing in addition to milling and turning.Will they ever beat the speed of a gear hob? Wilker said. No. But if you have low or medium volumes and dont want to spend a million and a half dollars on a gear machine, you can buy an Integrex and have gear capability at your fingertips.Besides more traditional multi-tasking combinations, Mazak offers so-called hybrid multitasking ma-chines that bring additive manufac-turing or joining techniques, such as friction stir welding, together with subtractive processes in a sin-gle machine. The machines can be equipped with powder deposition or laser hot-wire deposition addi-tive manufacturing technologies. Although powder-based processes can produce more detailed geome-tries, the company prefers hot wire, which involves melting material in wire form using energy from a laser beam.We do not like the environment that powder creates in a machine tool, Wilker said. We like hot wire because its a much cleaner pro-cess, and the deposition rate is also 10 times faster.The company recently sold its first VTC-800 vertical machining center equipped with a hot-wire at-tachment.On one side of a big trunnion table, Wilker said, you can grow a part pretty large, then final machin-ing can be done on the same plat-form.CTEcontributors DMG Mori USA Inc.847-593-5400www.dmgmori.comMazak Corp.859-342-1700www.mazakusa.comMethods Machine Tools Inc. Mazak877-668-4262 A friction stir welding head can be added to a machine tool to create a hybrid multitasking www.methodsmachine.com machine.ctemag.com/cteguide.com27MultitaskMachine.indd 27 11/13/20 12:22 PM'