Two new Nakamura turning centres at Riverside Precision Engineering have halved lead times on some parts.
The machines were supplied by the Engineering Technology Group (ETG).
With a range of sliding head turning centres machining components for the hydraulic, medical, brewing, valve, marine, rail and oil and gas industries, the Blackburn company was utilising an ageing Nakamura WT250 turning centre for components beyond the diameter capacity limits of its sliding head machines.
To increase capacity and improve machine utilisation, the ISO: 9001:2015 certified company reviewed the market and decided to purchase a Nakamura AS200L and a Nakamura AS200 turning centre.
Founded over 31 years ago, the 13 employee business made its first venture into CNC machining in 2002 and this was rapidly followed by volume machining on sliding head turning centres. For components beyond the diameter range of sliding head centres, the company has a variety of fixed head single and twin-spindle turning centres.
Riverside Director, Mr Scott Whalley said: “Components in the 50 to 65mm diameter range that are beyond our sliding head machines have been an issue. We have a lot of small-batch work typically from 50 to 500-off that is relatively simple to produce – for this we bought the Nakamura AS200 single-spindle chucking machine. For the more complex work in the 300 to 2,000+ batch range, we bought the bar-fed twin-spindle Nakamura AS200L. This gives us the perfect blend of capability, flexibility and capacity for our business. We have the AS200 chucker machine manually loaded with billets and the AS200L runs unmanned with a barfeed for longer batches.”
Scott continues: “The cycle times on the new Nakamura machines are much faster than our other large-capacity turning centres. In fact, the single spindle Nakamura AS200 chucking machine is faster than our ageing twin-spindle machines. The cycle times on both Nakamura machines are much faster, there is less idle time and the kinematics ensure less ‘air cutting’. The rapid rates are faster and the machines react a lot quicker than our other machines. As a business, we are extremely busy at present and our larger components up to 65mm diameter was a bottleneck. The new Nakamura machines have cut lead times from 6 weeks to just 3 weeks on these larger parts.”