Barfeed manufacturer and subcontractor Hydrafeed has built its machining capacity around four XYZ ProtoTRAK-controlled machines.
Renowned for its Multifeed barfeed systems for CNC lathes, the Milton Keynes-based company is also a subcontract machinist for customers in the aerospace, special purpose machinery, and tobacco machinery sectors.
To meet the machining demands of both sides of its business Hydrafeed has an extensive machine shop capacity, ranging from manual machines through to machining and turning centres.
Hydrafeed has been in operation for almost 50 years as a family-owned business with current managing director Martyn Page joining the company as a toolmaker 35 years ago. In 2012, along with his wife and son, he took the opportunity to buy Hydrafeed and maintain that family-owned tradition. Along the way the barfeed element of the business has grown, with around one unit/day being dispatched, in addition machine tool robot automation is now part of the Hydrafeed portfolio of equipment. These barfeed systems are mainly sold through OEM machine tool suppliers, such as XYZ Machine Tools. However, the resulting ongoing investment in machining capacity to meet the needs of the barfeed production meant that machines were sometimes underused, so Hydrafeed expanded its operations to encompass a sub-contract machining service.
“Our subcontract work is tightly-controlled and we manage the type of business we take on quite closely; focussing on regular customers with none of them dominating our capacity, the old 80/20 rule applies here,” says Martyn Page. Over the years we have continued to invest in machining technology, but like many we have faced the skills challenge. Helping to overcome that are the four XYZ machines that we have, which sit perfectly between our manual capacity and our machining and turning centres. The ProtoTRAK controls on the XYZ mills and lathes are straightforward to use and we have been very pleased with them. They are perfect for one-offs and smaller batch work.”
The XYZ machines installed at Hydrafeed are an SLX355 ProTURN lathe, an SLX 1630 ProTURN lathe and two SMX 2000 ProtoTRAK turret mills.
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