At the Elland, West Yorkshire factory of Archway Engineering, which manufactures drilling equipment for site investigation, mineral exploration, water well construction and environmental monitoring, a Leadwell V-50L three-axis vertical machining centre performs some of the shop floor’s more arduous machining operations. Remarkably, the company has seen a doubling of component productivity on this machine simply by changing the method of workpiece clamping.
The transformation is courtesy of investment in three US-made Chick OneLOKs from sole UK agent 1st Machine Tool Accessories. One of the units remains permanently at one end of the machine’s 1420 x 610 mm table, where it has been clocked into a known position to within 10 µm across the 152 mm face of the clamp’s fixed hard jaw. The other two OneLOKs are removable to make room to mount a 4th-axis indexer, but they are quick to set up again relative to the permanently-positioned clamp by means of a parallel bar.
During frequent small-batch runs, it is a simple matter to secure three parts side by side, write a sub-program to machine the workpiece in the permanent One LOK, probe the position of the parts in the other two clamps, repeat the sub-program twice at the appropriate offsets, and run the complete cycle in one go.
Danielle Toner, production manager at Archway Engineering, says: “The quicker set-up times using the Chick OneLOKs and the faster machining cycles that their secure clamping allow means we can produce a typical short batch of parts on the Leadwell in two days, compared with up to one week previously.Overall, our investment in Chick work-holding solutions has been a fantastic success and the advice and service provided by 1st Machine Tool Accessories have been first class.”
More information www.1mta.com
