Growing performance demands in the mechanical manufacturing field have lead to a great development of the machine tools domain, regarding especially the productivity and the manufacturing precision. When equipping a machine tool with an automatic tool changer and an automatic pallet mechanism, the obtained result is a machining center. For small series products, milling machining centers fulfill the precision and productivity requirements, through the advantages of a reduced auxiliary time and reduced operating errors. This paper presents a new technical solution of the rotary table indexing mechanism used on milling machining centers, which offers a very high positioning precision, by using a curvic coupling and a hydraulically driven table clamp/unclamp mechanism.
