In the first half of this year Roscomac has committed to £750,000 of investment, including the installation of the latest Miyano BNE-51MSY multi-axis turn-mill centre.
The Worthing-based subcontract machinist company dispatches some 1.5 million parts a year – ranging from completed assemblies and sub-assemblies to large machined castings and small turned parts – and is currently achieving a record on-time delivery rate of 98%.
Managing director Joe Martello explains that the company is driven by a philosophy of constant development of lean manufacturing techniques, supported by investment often exceeding £1 million a year and an ‘open-liaison’ people strategy which keeps the workforce up to date on the company and any issues arising.
He says: “We invest in automation and the latest production technology which helps to overcome the shortage of skills we would require. However, it so important that we still need to grow our own engineers through constant support and by training, in order to maximise our return-on-investment and so improve how we support and what we deliver to customers.”
In addition to the new Miyano the company has already ordered two Citizen CNC sliding head turn-mill centre machines. The two machines, a Citizen L20-VIII LFV (LFV featuring low frequency vibration cutting technology) and a top-of-the-range M16-V will bring the total Citizen installations to 14.
Cell Leader Sean Keet says: “The levels of operational flexibility in the Miyano BNE has enabled us to significantly reduce machining times and most important, improve overall productivity.”
He says the new machine has replaced existing 3-axis machines so that a family of 10 aluminium parts that previously required four turning operations and a separate milling operation can now be produced in one turn-milling cycle.
A massive bonus is that average total cycle times per part has been cut from 13 mins to just 2.5 mins. A further complex stainless steel component which had three operations taking 11 minutes is now reduced to a single, four-minute cycle.
Further return-on-investment comes from freeing-up setters to perform other tasks and from the reduction of lost time for each first-off inspection, reducing the risk of setting and relocation errors and cutting work in progress.
The flexibility of the BNE-51MSY is key to its success as it is capable of single cycle cutting with three tools simultaneously overlapped at both ends of a workpiece at the same time, and using bar up to 51 mm bar diameter.
The fixed-head 15 kW main spindle and two-axis 7.5 kW secondary spindle, both with maximum speeds of 5,000 revs/min, have the advantage of synchronised / superimposed control for both 12-station, all-driven turrets. Ideal for complex and heavier drilling and milling cycles, each driven tool position has 2.2 kW drive delivering 25 Nm of torque and speeds up to 6,000 revs/min.
Altogether Roscomac has some 50 CNC machine tools including 13 Citizen CNC sliding head turn-mill centres and a large 104 pallet flexible manufacturing system.
There are also 17 machining centres in the plant involved in supplying medical (20% of £6.5 million turnover) aerospace (12%) vacuum technology, oil and gas, motion and hydraulics and nuclear sectors involving the processing of a wide range of materials from plastics through to alloy steels such as Inconel. Parts are also exported to France, Germany and Czech Republic.
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