The head is the hand; the machine around it is the arm. There are three common arms: the vertical gantry (a huge Cartesian frame, most common in aerospace, for long parts like wings), the horizontal gantry (delivers sideways onto a rotating tool, for barrels, with room to inspect from the other side), and the robot (joints instead of axes: cheaper, faster to build, flexible). Whatever the arm, one small detail decides a lot of the quality: how far the tow travels from spool to roller.

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