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Aerospace manufacturing requires efficient manufacturing processes. Composite materials are extensively used and manufacturing processes must evolve to overcome composite constraints for manufacturing and joining. Bolting is an extended joining process for composite materials in which a deformable blind bolt is stressed until joining forces are high enough to cause bolt breakage and ensure sufficient compression forces in the joint. Among bolting methods, blind bolting is an efficient composite joining method that enables the construction of aerospace composite structures accessing joints from a single side of the joint (front side), thus allowing for constructing closed structures where accessing the back side (blind side) is not possible. However, not being able to access the deformed head at the blind side prevents to perform a quality control and ensure a proper bolt deformation and a proper installation.

Aluminum skin milling is a very challenging process due to the high quality requirements needed in the aeronautic and aerospace industries. Nowadays, on these markets, there are just two technological approaches able to face the manufacturing of this sort of wide thin blanks: chemical and mechanical milling by means of highly complex machines. Both solutions lead to a high investment requirement that affect directly on the application profitability on these industrial sectors. This paper presents a flexible machining system that allows milling skin shaped parts within required tolerances by means of an innovative universal holding fixture combined with an adaptive toolpath development. This flexible holding fixture can be adapted to the required shape and can hold uniformly the whole sheet surface. Besides, the solution includes an implementation that can adapt the machining toolpath by means of the skin thickness online measurement.