Torque-rich 130 mm quill center with 2500 mm X travel for heavy UAE jobs.
Bam, huge casting, wide box ways, nothing flimsy here, you feel the mass even before the riggers slide the skid off the trailer. The Hyundai WIA KBN-1300C looks like a boring mill that somehow took a crash-diet and became a horizontal center, still a beast though. Korean builders keep pushing these heavy machines for UAE job shops chasing oil & gas valves, heat-exchanger plates, and the occasional odd power-generation housing.
Short note, then a breath. X travel 2500 mm, Y 2000 mm, Z 1600 mm, plus a 700 mm quill. That quill, by the way, saves setups, some swear by it, others leave it retracted forever, your call. Rapids clock at 15000 mm/min in linear axes, rotary table swings with 4 rpm max, not spectacular, yet safe for parts around 8000 kg.
The table is 1400 × 1600 mm, full-contour B-axis with hydraulic clamping. No pallet changer on the C version, C stands for “conventional” table, the P variant brings dual pallets but also +5 t mass and price. Many shops in Sharjah avoid the P, space is premium, so stationary table is fine.
Before jumping into a spec sheet a tiny table will put numbers where the mouth is.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| X-axis stroke | 2500 mm |
| Y-axis stroke | 2000 mm |
| Z-axis stroke | 1600 mm |
| Quill travel (W) | 700 mm |
| Spindle power | 37 kW |
| Spindle torque | 1620 N·m |
| Tool capacity | 60 |
| Floor space | 7.2 × 5.8 m |
Numbers are cool, yet sometimes they float in a vacuum. So let us anchor them with two quick scenes from real shops in Abu Dhabi.
Short burst, then digress, then back. 2500 rpm is not fast, nobody expects it to be. What matters is torque, 1620 N·m at 60 rpm according to the service manual dated 2023. BT50 interface, four drawbar fingers, pull-stud angle 45°. Gearbox? Yes, 2-step ZF built under license, you can hear it shift, charming old-school growl.
Fanuc 31i-B5 standard, yet most UAE buyers add Manual Guide i because programmers prefer conversational for single-piece work. Ethernet built-in, no fancy OPC UA, still enough to feed production trackers. If you run Siemens across the shop, sorry, optional but pricey lead time 18 weeks.
Tanks hold 900 L emulsion, paper belt skimmer OEM, though half the time you will toss it and mount a magnetic drum from a local fabricator in Ajman. Screw conveyors both sides, pitch 320 mm, evacuation height 1400 mm, plays nicely with standard steel bins.
We pause a second, then jot down what most foremen ask during demo.
And now we step away from the list, letting the points sink in. The thermal mesh is quite handy in desert climates, mornings start at 26 °C, afternoons hit 43 °C, cast iron cycles like crazy and geometry drifts if you ignore it.
Time for the unavoidable who-is-better. The market segment bundles Doosan DBC-130C, Fermat WFT 13 R, and this KBN-1300C. Fermat leads in spindle RPM (3000), Doosan boasts heavier X travel (3000 mm), Hyundai sits in the middle but gives longer quill, and surprisingly the shortest overhang when the spindle is retracted, so accuracy stays within ±0.008 mm across the cube according to our ballbar test. In Dubai’s JAFZA free zone, two shops switched from WFT 13 to KBN last year because Fermat delivery lagged 14 months, they could not wait.
The KBN line started back in 2008, first batch was KBN-135C, then KBN-135P, later a scaled unit KBN-1300C arrived in 2020 to suit containers without flat-rack, clever logistics tweak. Same column, shorter saddle, identical headstock. There is a bigger brother, KBN-1500P, 150 mm spindle, but most SMEs avoid it due to ceiling height.
Digging deeper into day-to-day perks.
Again, step away, breathe. Operators do appreciate outward panels, you avoid ladders, less downtime.
Full load current 95 A at 400 V. UAE grids fluctuate, hence Hyundai bundles an AVR rated 125 kVA right in the control cabinet. Air required 0.6 MPa, 600 L/min, nothing exotic. Chip conveyor motor 0.75 kW, add-on mist extractor optional, roughly 1.1 kW.
You cannot drop 38 t on a regular shop slab, needs 1.2 m deep reinforced footing, C40 concrete, eight anchor points M36. Vibration studies by Abu Dhabi Polytechnic suggest dynamic amplitude under 4 µm if the pad is isolated from adjacent presses by 150 mm rubber cork layer.
Oilfield couplings, heat sink plates for solar farms, skid pump housings, they all share one requirement, massive rough stock, machined in one-hit setups. The long travel plus quill means you mount the blank once, probe, swing the B table, finish all faces, done. Less forklift ballet, more spindle hours, simple math.
Hyundai WIA, 46 years on the market, churns out around 13 000 CNC units annually across 38 models. For the KBN series there have been three iterations of the headstock, the 2022 version replaced the old Belleville disc pack with a preloaded spring stack, cutting down tool drop incidents to zero during field survey.
Not a fairy tale. You will fight backlash on the B axis after 6000 h if you ignore lube intervals, also the screw conveyor side walls are thin, chip impact dents them and paddles scrape, fixed with a quick weld but still, nitpick.
In the end the machine slots nicely between mid-size horizontal centers and full boring mills. Good torque, decent reach, predictable geometry drift, plus spare parts fly in from Busan within 72 h thanks to direct cargo to Dubai.
Because petrochem orders are feast-or-famine, you need a floor-standing workhorse that can sit idle a week then rip 220 HB carbon steel all night without alignment drama. KBN-1300C does exactly that, no more, no less.
Heavy box ways, long quill, chilled gearbox, all translate into confident metal removal, and that flows into shorter delivery dates for clients, so procurement managers sign the PO quicker.
