The retrofit of Heidenhain TNC 320 controls and drives to three large Elgamill travelling-column bed mills at the Swansea factory of subcontractor Afon Engineering have improved their reliability and performance. It has been an object lesson in how mechanically sound machine tools built in the late 1980s can be given a new lease of life for a fraction of the cost of investing in new equipment.

Engineering director Andrew Beaujean says: “The project has given us more confidence to take on a much broader variety of contracts and is bringing in new business as a result, such as evaporator tube plate machining.”

The refurbished machines at Afon have beds measuring 12, 10 and 8 m respectively in the X axis. The mid-size model, when it was installed in 2009 with an earlier Heidenhain TNC 355 control, was the first CNC machine on site. The other two Elgamills, which arrived five and 11 years later, were fitted with a TNC 155 CNC system. Two smaller, as-yet unmodernised machines from the same manufacturer are also on the shop floor.

The upgrade to the new controls has considerably reduced programming times by up to 50%, making more jobs economical to undertake. A benefit of having identical TNC 320s on three Elgamills is that, from the operator’s perspective, all keys, buttons and switches are in the same place, so swapping between machines is seamless. Moreover, the overall cost of the refurbishments was within budget at approximately £350,000 for all three machines, an order of magnitude less than purchasing three new machining centres of similar capacities.More information www.heidenhain.co.uk