Unicut Precision invested over £1.5 million last year as part of a strategic investment plan to become a supply partner.
The investment covered seven machine tools, of which six were mill-turn centres supplied by Citizen Machinery UK – a two Miyano BNE-51MSY fixed head lathes and and four Cincom L12-VII sliding head mill-turn centres, with one featuring Low Frequency Vibration (LFV) technology.
The contribution to increased productivity targets is set to help sales hit £5 million this year.
Managing Director Jason Nicholson said: “Our order book reflects our revised strategy to move from being a subcontract machinist reacting to orders as they roll in, to one that continuously generates business from being a ‘supply partner’. In this role, we have a policy of a willingness to invest and align our production capability across the company to the customers product and delivery needs.”
Unicut is shipping on average 1.2 million parts a month and processes 370 different product orders of which a third is directly exported. In addition, as the company has moved forward, it has added the responsibility to provide some 30 different ‘direct-to-line’ assemblies and sub-assemblies to customers.
The decision to install two Miyano BNE-51MSY fixed head machines followed the firm’s market review of twin-turret, two spindle turn-mill centres that could suit parts already perfected and produced in batch quantities between 2,000 and 5,000 on top-of-the-range Citizen Cincom M32 sliding head machines which were coming up to five years old.
Said Mr Nicholson: “Such has been our reliability to meet the production schedule we found the customer was then seeking an uplift of some 20 per cent in the demand. We immediately decided to keep us cost-competitive and maintain the schedule now in front of us, we needed to expand and revise our well-proven ‘single-hit’ methods on the Cincom M32 sliding head machines and drive ahead with the best technology and application engineering to achieve the levels of productivity we needed.”
The company also replaced a number of sliding head machines with h four Cincom L12-VII’s of which one could be specified with LFV cutting technology. LFV introduces oscillation to the action routine of the cutting tool backing it off through the servo axes in the direction of feed using the enhanced development of the machine’s special drive system. This happens in phases of tens of microns which are precisely synchronised with the rotation of the machine spindle. The resulting controlled ‘air-cutting’ breaks the swarf into the designated chip length which prevents ‘stringing’ and ‘bird-nesting’ and can be applied to turning, drilling and even threading cycles.
Citizen UK has now supplied 70 machines to Unicut since 1999.
Unicut Precision employs 51 people including five apprentices at the Welwyn Garden City factory. Growth has been steady and controlled from £2.2 million in 2010 to hit £5 million this year. The company exports to both North and South America, Mexico, France, Germany and Malta supplying the high end automotive as well as the aerospace sector. It is also a very strong supplier to customers in the hydraulic and pneumatics industries.
Set up originally as a subcontract turning firm it has progressively ventured very successfully into multi-axis turn-milling and now into 5-axis milling with robotised production cells. Batch work tends to cover 2,000 parts to continuous processing which leads to some 300 tonnes of steel, brass and aluminium passing through the doors each year.