To upgrade its plant and instigate 24-hour production later this year, High Wycombe-based subcontract machining firm EV Engineering has bought four Japanese-built Okuma turn-mill centres from sole UK agent NCMT. Founded in 2001 by David White, the subcontractor specialises in producing complex prismatic components in exotic materials for the oil, gas and energy sector, which accounts for around three-quarters of the firm’s turnover.

It was at EMO 2005 – where Okuma launched its first Multus turn-mill machine with a B-axis spindle – that EV Engineering became interested in the Okuma range of machinery. The five-axis Multus features collision avoidance in real-time, both in-cycle and in-manual mode, preventing collisions and minimising unscheduled downtime. It was the latest version of this Multus machine, with a sub-spindle and steady rest, which arrived on the shop floor in 2018.

“It’s an extremely rigid, slant-bed lathe on which we carry out a lot of machining, including deep-hole drilling in titanium and Inconel,” says White. “We don’t consider it feasible to leave it producing high-value parts unattended, so we don’t intend to add automation on this machine. The same currently goes for the Okuma Genos L3000 that we bought the same year, as it’s a two-axis lathe with live tooling dedicated to producing smaller parts in lower volumes.”

He adds: “It is our intention, however, to retrofit a robot to the Multus U3000-2SW multi-tasking B-axis lathe with automatic tool changer, lower turret and sub-spindle that we installed in December 2019, to give us the benefit of lights-out running.”

An Okuma Space Turn LB3000-MY lathe with live Y-axis turret is currently on order and will be fitted with a Belgian-manufactured RoboJob Turn-Assist.

For further information
www.ncmt.co.uk