Alba Gaskets has successfully completed a management buy-out (MBO). The announcement was made during a visit to the company’s Altens premises by Minister for Trade, Investment & Innovation, Ivan McKee, MSP.
McKee toured Alba Gaskets’ manufacturing facility and met with key members of the management team. Managing director Gavin Sim and director Sigfrid Ruz, will head up the new company structure. Sim is one of the company’s founders and has more than 21 years’ technical and management experience in the gasket sector.
For further information www.albagaskets.com
Two multi-edge tool systems have been added by Walter GB to its range of products for grooving and parting-off – the Walter Cut MX, with four cutting edges for parting-off small workpieces up to 12 mm diameter, and the two-edge Walter Cut GX34 for work up to 65 mm diameter.
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These additions complement the existing Walter Cut GX24 double-edged grooving inserts for workpieces up to 46 mm diameter. The result is that Walter users can now complete 90% of all grooving applications with standard tools from its catalogue.
Walter’s Standard MX system tools feature insert widths between 0.8 and 3.25 mm for cutting depths up to 6 mm, though the company can provide special sizes and designs – grooving with chamfer, for example – on request via the Walter Xpress service. The Walter Cut GX34 has grooving inserts with widths of 3 or 4 mm for cutting depths up to 33 mm.
By developing the tools, Walter engineers say they have successfully overcome a range of important ‘accepted weaknesses’ with standard grooving tools, including poor chip breaking, chip removal, cooling and securing of the indexable inserts – which is often awkward, imprecise and insufficient.
Parting-off and deep grooving are widely considered particularly difficult processes, and such applications are generally performed with cutting values that are too low, to avoid tool breakage or other problems. According to Walter, these weaknesses have also been eliminated with the new MX and GX systems.
Walter MX tools offers a new approach to clamping, which Walter says is more user friendly and reliable. The tangentially clamped insert aligns itself independently and accurately in the machining direction, while a dowel pin in the insert seat ensures precise and secure fixing.
For further information www.walter-tools.com
The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), Andrea Leadsom, has officially opened the Manufacturing Technology Centre’s new innovation and knowledge hub for metal additive manufacturing (AM), ahead of a major industrial launch event this week.
In a significant advance for the UK, the hub aims to lead research, development and collaboration on metal AM, developing and testing ideas for taking the technology forward. The hub, in the MTC’s Aerospace Research Centre at Coventry, will be formally launched to industry on 15 October.
For further information www.the-mtc.org
The CoroDrill DS20 from cutting tool and tooling system specialist Sandvik Coromant is said to be the first indexable drill concept capable of producing hole depths up to 7xD.
Replacing the existing CoroDrill 880 and CoroDrill 881 tools, 4-5xD CoroDrill DS20 indexable drills provide tool life improvements of up to 25% and productivity gains up to 10%, depending on workpiece material, reports Sandvik Coromant. However, the 6-7xD variants represent an entirely new capability range of indexable drills. To complement the introduction, the company is releasing a new Modular Drilling Interface (MDI) that acts as a coupling between the drill and adaptor. Available in Coromant Capto and HSK shank types, the MDI provides high precision, good centring capabilities and reduced tool inventory.
“Among the most important factors when drilling to depths of more than 5xD is controlled cutting forces, secure chip evacuation and high centring capabilities,” explains Håkan Carlberg, senior R&D engineer – indexable drilling at Sandvik Coromant. “Going from a 5xD to a 7xD drill, the theoretical difficulty increases approximately three-fold due to an increased inclination to bend. Designing a CoroDrill DS20 7xD drill requires careful consideration for around 50 parameters that all depend on each other. The outcome is improved process security through lower forces and lighter cutting, particularly at entry. In turn, users achieve lower cost per hole, the ability to drill deeper and reduced sound levels.”
The drill body is strong and fatigue-resistant with higher levels of stiffness than ever achieved before, while chip flute shapes are individually designed for each drill size and insert. This combination of factors leads to less vibration, predictable wear patterns and increased tool life.
For further information www.sandvik.coromant.com
Welshpool-based Castalum, which is currently one of the largest die-casting companies in the UK, is relying on tooling solutions from Mapal to help it control cost per part for the products it supplies to the automotive sector.
Referring to the relationship with Mapal, Peter Radcliffe, chairman at Castalum, says: “We went into machining absolutely from scratch. However, we knew that Mapal were a good option in terms of quality and what they could supply in regard to both their advice and their tooling. So, we immediately chose them as a partner and it’s something we’ve never regretted. Right now, Mapal do not only supply us with tooling, they provide concurrent engineering advice for practically every quotation request that passes through the company.”
Mapal’s Ted Coyle adds: “When I first became aware of Castalum many years ago, they were only involved in castings. They then diversified into machining as many customers were asking for this service. Castalum got involved with Heller Machine Tools and their first job was a turnkey project. Heller works extensively on machining solutions for castings, like those undertaken at Castalum with Mapal on PCD tooling.
“We did the tooling on those initial projects and Castalum were then interested in approaching jobs on a ‘cost-per-piece’ basis,” he continues. “So, we came up with an offer to do components on this premise. The first work was the Trag 6 piece clutch housing. That worked very well and from there on in, we then started doing every project at Castalum.
“The next job was a BMW steering housing and then we did the MT82 gearbox rear case, the Georgio clutch/rear housing, and the B6 Plus, which is a larger derivative of the original B6.”
For further information www.mapal.com
