A specialist in e-drives, Békéscsaba-based Linamar Technology Hungary, has invested in machines from EMAG to produce shafts and gears. The number of components is expected to increase to more than 2 million parts per year in the future – up from around 300,000 components at present. The new production solution is optimally prepared for this increase. The decision in favour of technology from EMAG was made on the basis of intensive market research.

“In the end, we chose EMAG because the company offers and masters a wide range of technologies,” explains István Bíró, project leader at Linamar Technology Hungary. “Furthermore, EMAG develops innovative solutions that help us streamline our production processes.”

Specifically, Linamar Technology Hungary uses EMAG VL 6 and VT 2-4 vertical lathes, and the VLC 200 GT vertical turning and grinding centre for the hard machining of gears and shafts. The latter is an ideal illustration of the advantages of EMAG’s holistic approach: the machine is loaded at a particularly high speed by the integrated pick-up spindle. After the spindle with the component has assumed its machining position, hard rough turning starts in quick succession. Only a residual allowance of a few microns then remains on the gear wheel. This ensures a significantly shortened grinding process with the aid of the integrated grinding spindle. At the same time, machining quality benefits from the turning-grinding combination: if only a small allowance needs to be ground off after turning, the grinding wheel specification can be more specifically designed for the desired final quality. Overall, Linamar’s production planners can therefore dispense with a further grinding operation.

Linamar has seen similar leaps in productivity with its VL 6 and VT 2-4 lathes, which are used for turning operations on gears and shafts of different sizes.

For further information
www.emag.com

Fort Vale Engineering, Burnley, is a manufacturer of stainless steel valves and ancillaries used in the tank container industry for the transportation of bulk liquids and gases by road, rail and sea. The company had been making one particular type of valve for several years in four sequential operations on lathes and machining centres in a lead-time of 24 hours.
To speed throughput and raise profitability, the manufacturer was keen to find a production solution that would see a billet enter a machining platform and a finished component emerge after a much shorter time. Considerable research and trials led to the discovery of the ideal process, which takes just eight hours.

It required the purchase of a Japanese-built Okuma Multus U4000 multi-tasking turn-mill centre with B-axis milling spindle and twin-opposed work spindles from sole UK agent NCMT. The supplier turnkey-engineered the cell with Turn-Cut (interpolation turning) software in the control and a chip reader to keep track of tools on the shop floor.

Stephen Maher, process improvement engineer at the Burnley factory, says: “To manufacture this product in one hit, we needed a turn-mill centre with a long Y-axis movement. This prerequisite was satisfied by the 300 mm Y axis on the relatively compact U4000, saving us having to buy an unnecessarily large and expensive machine.

“However, the most notable attribute of the production centre is Okuma’s Turn-Cut software in the proprietary OSP control,” he continues. “It allows one port in the valve to be machined to an accuracy of +25 µm -0 µm, by exploiting a second mode of turning [interpolation turning] using the milling spindle and a boring bar with a Sandvik CoroTurn carbide insert.

For further information
www.ncmt.co.uk