Colchester appoints sales manager for south

Colchester Machine Tool Solutions has expanded its growing sales and support team by appointing Sean Luck as the company’s new southern area sales manager.

Luck will sell a full range of machine tools, including Colchester and Harrison lathes, and Clausing mills, drills, saws and grinders. Based out of Portsmouth, Luck is a time-served engineer, starting as a toolmaking apprentice in the subcontract industry and working his way up to works management. He now has around 25 years of both machine and cutting tool sales experience, and is very well known within the industry.
Paul Rushworth, sales director at Colchester Machine Tool Solutions, says: “We’ve known Sean for a number of years and he has huge experience of machine and cutting tools, which already includes a great knowledge of Colchester and Harrison lathes. As we continue to introduce innovations to the market, Sean’s recruitment underpins this continued expansion and further bolsters our UK sales, applications and service effort, supporting our customers’ needs for Colchester, Harrison and Clausing products.”
For further information www.colchester.co.uk

Victor CNC releases latest Vturn

The existing Victor Vturn-26HD has long been pitched at manufacturers with a need for a mid-sized turning centre that delivers power, precision and reliability. Now, Victor CNC has added to this line with the arrival of the Vturn-S26.

Complementing the existing Vturn-26 HD and VT-A26CM, the new arrival has been re-engineered to provide a host of features that include the option of a servo-powered C axis to offer driven tooling stations. This new facility gives end users the option of the cost-effective two-axis Vturn-26HD workhorse, or the more flexible three-axis Vturn-S26.
As with all Victor CNC machine tools, the foundation for the Vturn-S26 is a large, sturdy single-piece slant-bed. The single-piece design eliminates the possibility of coolant leakage, while the 30° design lowers the centre of gravity to enhance rigidity and performance. In addition, the new configuration provides a large swing diameter that enables end users to load larger billets.
The performance of the Vturn-S26 is encapsulated in its 18/24 m/min rapid feed rates and thrust force of 1441 kg/f that reduces chip-to-chip times and elevates productivity. Further contributing to productivity levels is the 12-station live tooling turret. The BMT-65 turret has an indexing time of just 0.8 seconds, while the 4.5 kW motor delivers live tooling speeds of 4000 rpm with high levels of torque, rigidity and repeatability generated from Victor Taichung’s own turret configuration.
Despite its nimble and productive performance, the Vturn-S26 offers a spindle output of 22 kW with 574 Nm of torque, which permits heavy-duty cutting.
For further information www.victorcnc.com

Producing precision watch components

Founded in 2016, Geneva-based Badeco SA manufactures high-precision components for the watchmaking industry.

The company produces watch crowns, push-pieces, tubes, pinions, arbors, watch hands and parts for associated sectors, all on its in-house Tornos turning centres.
“We purchased two SwissNano CNC automatic lathes from Tornos as soon as we started our activities,” says managing director Stéphane Menoni. “Right from the start, they have proved to be particularly flexible and precise, while requiring minimum floor space.”
What was decisive, apart from the small footprint, was the flexibility of the SwissNano machines.
“Some high-precision components are manufactured in volumes up to 25,000 off, but it is also common practice to produce in small series or even perform one-off production,” says Menoni. “This means we can efficiently manufacture prototypes or spare parts.
“Since the space in our premises is restricted, we have installed the machines in an inverted position to gain additional space; this arrangement enables full access to the machining cell from the front,” he adds. “The machines are equipped with bar feeders and can be used for back machining as well as gear-cutting operations.”
Commissioning was quite easy, as Menoni affirms: “Just three days after the installation of the machines, the operator was fully familiar with set-up and operation. On the one hand, this was down to simplicity, and on the other it was the intuitive functions of the TISIS code editor. The latter is simply fantastic, since it allows program editing/transfer and tool selection, as well as machining process monitoring.”
For further information www.tornos.com

Top of the food chain

Dowson Food Machinery was established in Yorkshire in 1982 under the skilled entrepreneurship of founder John Murgatroyd.

He set about designing new products for slicing and bagging bread, and before long was supplying bespoke equipment and service support to many of the UK’s leading bakery groups, as well as to smaller independent and artisan bakers.
Now run by managing director Nick Lacey, the company exports across five continents and has machines installed at customers such as Warburtons and Hovis.
The success of the business meant that expansion was inevitable and, in 2015, it moved to a new 48,000 sq ft facility in Bradford, nearly three times the size of the original factory. Now employing 60 people and with the space for more equipment, new lines were designed to include products for speciality breads, flatbreads, rolls and tortillas.
The company’s main asset today is its in-house CNC machining capability.
“We offer more than our competitors,” explains James Carson, sales and marketing manager. “To have our own Haas machines on-site is not only economical, it gives us a level of control over quality and lead-time which we would never have by outsourcing.
“We can alter or modify a component to change the way a piece of equipment works, then test it straight away in-house.”
In 2017, Dowson decided to replace one of its lathes and, after careful research, invested in a Haas ST-15 turning centre with a 15 kW, 4,000 rpm spindle and 210 mm chuck. “You get a lot of bang for your buck,” says purchasing manager Andrew Sands. “We paid less for the ST-15 than we did for a lathe we bought 10 years ago, and it more than matches it for accuracy and reliability.”
For further information www.haas.co.uk

Lathe control offers new functionality

Heidenhain’s top-of-the-range lathe control, the CNC Pilot 640 is now available with a number of new upgrades.

Most notably, a newly developed Turn Plus feature is now standard on new purchases. Turn Plus allows the creation of a lathe program at the push of a button, with up to 90% time savings, says Heidenhain.
The latest versions of the control software also include other improvements, such as added functional safety (FS) features and expansions that provide the machine operator and machine tool builder with more benefits.
Heidenhain’s CNC Pilot 640 contouring control allows five-axis simultaneous machining and combined turn-mill operations, full surface machining with B axis and counter spindle, as well as up to three channels for asynchronous multi-side machining.
Multi-touch operation permits swiping and zoom functions, while high-resolution 3D simulation graphics have been added. Machining operations with one or several set-ups (multi-channel operation) can be programmed separately through structured programming. The maximum number of controlled axes and spindles has been increased to 24 using appropriate options.
Heidenhain’s CNC Pilot 640 lathe control is available in two screen formats: 19“and 15.6“, with up to 25 configurable fields. The control also now works with Heidenhain’s display hand-wheels HR 520 (FS), and the HR 550 FS radio hand-wheel system. New CFRCompactFlash memory cards and SIKs are also available.
For those interested in connected machining, the CNC Pilot 640 can be incorporated into such systems by utilising the Heidenhain options Remote Desktop Manager (option 133) and StateMonitor for capturing machining data.
For further information www.heidenhain.com