SUBCONTRACTING NEWS

Stockholder invests in Ficep Valiant CNC line

Northwest-based steel stockholder CSM Steelstock has invested in a Ficep Valiant CNC line to extend its capabilities and further meet customer requirements.Supplying into the automotive, gas, oil and petrochemical industries, CSM Steelstock predicts that the Valiant CNC line from Ficep UK will add £4.5m to annual turnover at the Accrington business.

Says CSM Steelstock’s managing director Grant Moore: “Our investment in the Ficep Valiant CNC line will be a game changer for our business. We’ll be able to offer our existing customers more capabilities and help us further develop lasting partnerships. It will be running 80 hours a week and we already have a strong forward order book using the new line. We’vegrown year on year for the past 13 years and recently invested in new premises which, when redeveloped, will house our 21 employees and machinery in the 32,000 sq ft facility.”

The Ficep Valiant is a high-performance automated three-spindle drilling system for processing structural steel profiles. Offering six tool-change positions on each of the machine’s three spindles, the Valiant’s total tool capacity is 18. Its spindles are all direct drive with speeds up to 5000 rpm, while utilising HSK 80 tool holders enables heavy milling functionality.Notably, the 300mm auxiliary axis, which is available on all three spindles, allows for a wider range of control for each spindle. Its sub-axis spindle positioning enables simultaneous drilling on all three surfaces. The optional underside scribing device, also with sub-axis positioning, permits up to four-side simultaneous scribing operations.

Says Chris Berriman, Ficep UK sales director: “The Valiant is an ideal choice for CSM Steelstock as it will allow them to process to the high quality that its customers expect.”
For further information www.ficep.co.uk

Kasto technology cuts lead timesat stockholder

Bieber + Marburg, a steel and non-ferrous metals stockholder in Germany, is using a new sawing centre from Kasto for close-tolerance cutting to length of its various bar, tube, profile and other products. As a result, the company is seeing reduced lead times from order to delivery and can respond more flexibly to customer requests.

At Bieber + Marburg, the demand for sawing in particular is increasing enormously, so the company needed to examine how best to expand this side of its business and determine what technology to target. The conclusion was to purchase a new sawing centre from Kasto.

During a demonstration, the impressive speed of an automatic production circular saw from the KASTOvariospeed range impressed the stockholder’s management and it quickly became apparent that it would be the optimum solution to the shortfall in cutting capacity.
Adjacent to the circular saw, a KASTOsort robot is responsible for cut piece container management. The robot recognises the containers, which already contain the relevant delivery label, and loads the required parts into them automatically, even unattended over the weekend.

The new KASTOcenter varioplus 4 warehouse is 50 m long by 7 m wide and 9m high. It contains about 1500 shelves with space for material up to 7 m long and 330 mm in diameter. A gantry crane stores and retrieves stock at up to 60 m/min.

Marcel Finkernagel, director of administration and organisation at Bieber + Marburg, says: “The KASTOcenter varioplus 4 has enabled us to reduce set-up time from 15 to 20 minutes on the bandsaws, to less than two minutes on the circular saw. Operation is then automatic, with consistent quality of cut on material up to the saw’s maximum capacity of 330 mm diameter.”
For further information www.kasto.com

Automation supports contract machinist’s growth

Contract machining specialist Unicut Precision Engineering of Welwyn Garden City reportsan increase in annual turnover from £3m in 2016 to £8m currently, underpinned by investment of £1.7m in new production and inspection equipment over the past two years.
Around half of this investment went on two more Cincom sliding-head lathes and two additional Miyano fixed-head lathes from Citizen Machinery UK, bringing the totals of the bar-fed lathes on site to 24 and 11 respectively. The remaining funds supported the purchase of three new items of inspection equipment and an extension to the automatic pallet storage and retrieval system, linking three five-axis machining centres on site.

Regarding turning, which currently accounts for 85% of Unicut’s turnover, Jason Nicholson, owner and managing director, says that standardisation on Citizen lathes with their user-friendly, intuitive Mitsubishi controls greatly helps to mitigate the current shortage of skilled setter-operators. Use of this CNC system throughout the factory also speeds the training of staff and allows operators to swap easily between machines.

Programs are normally prepared offline with Esprit CADCAM and via Citizen Machinery’s own Alkart CNC Wizard programming aid. The latter guides operators through creation of part programs with the help of a built-in code library for machining processes, reducing the amount of time spent typing in G and M codes and consulting manuals or other programs.

Unicut’s latest turning centre additions are two 65 mm bar capacity Miyano BNE-65MYY models, each featuring a pair of Y-axis turrets and the latest Mitsubishi 15-inch touchscreen control. These machines joined five smaller fixed-head lathes in the same series to form a seven-machine cell for producing hydraulic and pneumatic components in volumes up to 10,000-off.
For further information www.citizenmachinery.co.uk

Cutting plastics down to size and shape

Mills CNChas supplied engineering plastic stockholder and precision subcontract machining specialist, Plastim Ltd, part of the Omnia Plastica SpA Group, with a new, large-capacity multi-tasking turning centre.The machine, a DN Solutions’ 12” chuck Puma 3100Y equipped with a 3000rpm spindle, 12-station turret, driven tooling (5000rpm), integrated Y-axis capability (±65mm) and the latest FANUC control is now in situ at the company’s 12,000sq ft facility in Cheltenham.

The Puma 3100Y sits in close proximityto three other Doosan lathes supplied by Mills CNC over the past 10 years and is machining a range of high-precision plastic parts for a growing number of UK customers operating in the oil and gas, aerospace, motorsport, electronics, transport, chemical, energy, food processing, and materials handling sectors, to name but a few.

The other machines supplied by Mills CNC that Plastim has at its disposal comprise a Puma 3100LY (installed in 2013), a Lynx 220LYA (2017), and a Lynx 300 (2021). All of the machines have FANUC controls ensuring easy program and part transfer between machines.

Says Warren Ironside, Plastim’s operations director:“Our Puma and Lynx lathes are real workhorses. They are powerful, fast, accurate and flexible.A number have Yaxes and driven tooling, enabling them to mill and drill components, as well as machine a range of features likegrooves, threads and other complex geometries, quickly, seamlessly and in one set up.Our lathes, backed by Mills CNC’s aftersales service and support, ensure that we’re able to meet the high accuracy, tight tolerance and fast turnaround demands of our customers.”
For further information www.millscnc.co.uk

GUHRING KEEPS SPINDLES TURNING AT PRECISION SUBCONTRACTOR

For more than 30 years, Birmingham-based Rowan Precision has been manufacturing high-quality parts for customers – and for much of this time, the company has relied upon Guhring UK to supply its cutting tools.

As a subcontract machining specialist to industries such as the defence, medical and aerospace sectors, AS9100 and ISO9001-accredited Rowan specialises in sliding and fixed-head multi-axis turning, as well asfive-axis machining. With more than 10 sliding-head turning centres on the shop floor, the company has an enviable reputation for the medium-to-high volume lights-out manufacturing of small components. It is here that the service from Guhring plays a pivotal role.

Commenting upon the longstanding relationship with Guhring UK, Matthew Lowe, technical director at Rowan Precision, says: “We’ve had a good relationship with Guhring for many years and they supply us with high-quality tooling and excellent technical advice. When we need something they are here to have conversations and meetings about upcoming jobs, and we can talk about the processes with Guhring’s technical team. We cut anything from plastics up to titanium, the high EN numbers, iridium platinum and other challenging materials. Guhring will sit down with us, look at our drawings and give us what we require to do the job.”

Looking at specific tools, Lowe says: “We use a bit of everything. This ranges from Guhring’s Micro end mills, its Diver cutters, the RF Speed and a lot of the Ratio range of through-coolant drills. We also use their grooving tools and the micro-boring system. We have an entire range of products and they are all very easy to use. Importantly, we have confidence that when we run lights out, we know how long the tool is going to last. Every component and every drawing has a defined tolerance; we need to ensure that the tooling we use can work within that tolerance for a certain period of time. The Guhring products certainly provide that confidence, giving us the ability to run our machines lights out.”

With such a diverse selection of Guhring tools utilised at Rowan Precision, the company also makes use of the Guhring TM multi-vending machine to ensure the correct tool is always on hand for the multitude of components that the company manufactures.

Considering specific applications, Lowe says: “We recently needed tools for a particular job and Chris Bush from Guhring came in and spoke to us about the application, the material and the number of parts we would be running. From this, Chris came back the same afternoon with suggestions and tool data from Guhring. We moved forward and purchased these tools and they are working very successfully. This excellent level of service supports our aims to achieve optimal machining performance and tool life.”

Discussing the relationship with Rowan Precision from a Guhring perspective, Guhring UK sales managerChris Bush says: “We’ve had a strong relationship with Rowan Precision for many decades and, as soon as they have a new component, they’ll give us a call and we’ll come in and take a look at the component, the drawing and recommend the tools best suited to the application.

“Rowan Precision has a lot of sliding-head turning centres machining small components, so they purchase our Micro Precision line of tools,” he continues.“This encompasses everything from milling cutters to drills. We also supply a lot of Micro Diver tools and Micro Milling cutters, which are perfect for all the typically hard-to-machine materials at Rowan Precision. This can range from grade 5 titanium to 316 stainless steel and everything in between.”

Discussing the continually expanding range of micro-tools, Bush concludes: “We’ve taken the Diver milling cutter geometry and incorporated that into a Micro Diver, so we get all the benefits of the Diver range on a micro-end mill. This allows Rowan to apply small tools to their difficult-to-machine materials while holding very tight tolerances and drastically reducing cycle times. As a company that runs lights-out machining, Rowan needs secure processes. They need tools that they have complete confidence in. The Guhring range of Micro Diver tools enables Rowan to set the machines up at the end of the shift when they go home, and know the tools will perform through the night. When the staff return to work in the morning, they are guaranteed high-quality components.”
For further information www.guhring.co.uk