For more than 70 years, the core competence of Gloor Brothers, an owner-managed family business based in Burgdorf, Switzerland has been the regulation of pressure and flow of technical gases. When the business earned its EN ISO: 13485 certification in 1994, this core competence was extended to medical technology.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for fittings in therapeutic oxygen delivery devices has risen sharply, resulting in a capacity bottleneck in the turning department at Gloor. Thanks to a long-standing collaboration between Gloor Medical and Tornos, both companies were able to react quickly and make valuable life-saving contributions.

In the 1990s, the management team at Gloor decided to purchase its first Tornos CNC machine, which is still in operation today for special fittings. Over time, five more Tornos single-spindle sliding-head lathes were added. These CNC machines play a major role in ensuring the manufacture of brass parts to the required quality.
Andreas Weyermann, head of manufacturing at Gloor

Brothers, is delighted with the recent arrival of a brand new Tornos EvoDECO 32, which was chosen for its precision and capabilities: “Our employees are trained at the Tornos Academy in Moutier. When they return from their courses, they have mastered the machine and its programs and can reach their full potential,” he says.

The Tornos machines run at full speed day and night.
“We still work in one shift, but the machines have a certain autonomy and run unattended for several hours overnight in the so-called ghost shift,” confirms Weyermann.

For further information
www.tornos.com

Coventry-based Adams Lubetech is a manufacturer of single-point and centralised lubrication equipment for OEMs in the food, compressor and conveyor sectors, and across industry in general. Consistently rising sales worldwide meant the company needed extra production capacity. So in early 2020 Adams Lubetech purchased its first lathe from Citizen Machinery, a fixed-head Miyano BNJ-51 turn-mill centre, to produce not only rotational parts, but components produced previously on a manual mill or a power press.

Eric Chambers, factory manager, says: “With these parts in mind, we wanted a powerful, rigid turning centre that was equally capable of milling. We selected the Miyano bar automatic primarily due to its competitive price. The first purely prismatic component we produced on it was an anchor block for our sister company in Belgium. We were milling and drilling the steel blocks manually in several operations, which was time-consuming, so we decided to use the Miyano as a chucking lathe to produce them automatically.”

The lathe effectively doubles as a CNC machining centre in this application. Each part, which has large threaded holes and smaller diameter holes machined into multiple faces, comes off the machine complete in a cycle time of 139 seconds.

The Miyano is also taking work from a power press at the Coventry factory, resulting in even greater advantages. A deep-drawn part previously required seven sequential operations, removal for skimming on a capstan lathe and return to the press for slotting. Lead-time was more than one month to produce a typical batch of 8000 and there was a lot of manual intervention for inter-machine handling. The same part is now produced in one hit from bar on the twin-spindle Miyano in 2.5 minutes, so the entire batch can be finished and shipped in a fortnight if the job is left to run around the clock, seven days a week.

For further information
www.citizenmachinery.co.uk