25this month
years ago
Industry & government talk training; Swedish machine tools; business recovering for
UK-based machine tool fi rms; press brake and CO2 laser profi ler innovation;
toolmaker-to-OEM journey; past & present of fl exible manufacturing cells
december 1994
The nal opinion piece of this year returns to the issue of
training. We cite two events, an industrial one at Birmingham’s
NEC, the other a political one at the House of Commons. The
latter concerned the announcement of the expansion of The
Engineering Council’s Technology Enhancement Programme, which
aims to reach 1,000 schools and colleges by 1997 to promote STEM.
Support and encouragement for industrial efforts to promote itself,
basically. At the NEC, industrialists were calling for greater support for
training in the manufacturing sector but were chided by an exgovernment
minister for not training enough, certainly in smaller
companies. An interesting juxtaposition of government and industry
views on boosting training. But at least the two events demonstrated
a united front on the importance of the activity, we conclude.
In news, we have an extended report on Sweden’s SMT, the
manufacturer of medium to large Swedturn CNC lathes, whose
Swedish owner plus its UK agent had both failed back in 1991. But it
had been rescued by the previous owners of Swedish milling machine
tool rm Varnemo (they sold that to Thai rm MKL). In the UK, ex-SMT
service engineer David Clarke established Advanced Technology
Machines, following SMT’s failure, to support the 400-odd Swedturn
machines in the UK (today still active as ATM Machine Tools). We
report that it is also now the agent for SMT and Modig (see last issue,
p28). SMT is developing a new CNC to support its engineered
solutions/CNC tailoring approach, while a new modular machine with
twin spindles and Y-axis is being considered, we report. SMT merged
with Storebro Machine Tools in 2004, a
company whose continued activity
Machinery cannot verify today.
In other news, we report that:
Jones & Shipman has won its largest
ever single order in the UK, for eight
CNC grinding machines; high speed
claiming that business is almost at pre-recession levels; Cincinnati
Milacron has won its rst order from Japan for low-cost Arrow vertical
machining centres (VMCs), 24 of them, while it also announces that
sales of its Sabre VMCs have passed the 1,000 mark – both models
are made in Birmingham (the factory closed in 2007); Hitachi Seiki
(UK) reports order intake doubled for the rst half of the year,
compared to 1993 (Hitachi Seiki was bought by Mori Seiki in 2002;
Mori Seiki is within DMG Mori); Ajax Machine Tool has bought the New
Era Conversion Company (Unidial) from Herbert Tooling, Coventry
(today’s Ajax Machine Tools is a resurrected version of this rm).
There’s interesting news from the EuroBlech sheet metalworking
machine tool show. Finnish rm Aliko Automation showed press
brakes turned though 90°, bending in a vertical not horizontal plane.
Two such machines with 2 m bending length each were placed side by
side, either side of a central beam, and each served by a 6-axis robot.
Minimal oorspace requirement was a bene t. Another innovation was
Mazak’s Super Charger Laser that, with its constant beam length,
boasted 3 kW CO2 laser performance from a 2 kW source.
We have two major feature articles. One looks at the further
progress of John Guest, a toolmaker turned push- t pipe coupling
innovator and moulder, the other reviews the development and
progress of exible manufacturing systems. Basically automated
versions of the 1960s’ Group Technology multi-manual-machine cells,
then becoming multiple CNC machining units of the 1980s (typically
pallet-pool-fed horizontal machining centres plus automated parts
handling), but which have now given way to single CNC machine cells
as individual machines become more capable. In whatever form,
reduced lead times, costs and rejects are the essence. Those are still
sought after today, of course, and single-machine, one-hit manufacture
is now well entrenched. Today, additive manufacturing provides one-hit
manufacture of complex parts that would have required multiple parts,
albeit made in one-hit operations, to be assembled to deliver the
press specialist Bruderer is
same. But it’s still early days for mass adoption of that process.
59
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