Case Study

FINISHED PARTS IN A SINGLE SETUP GIVE ROTAMIC THE EDGE

The purchase of a Nakamura-Tome WT 100 twin-spindle twin-turret turning centre has allowed Rotamic Engineering to cut lead times to its customers by producing finished components in a single setup. The investment has proved so successful that the company has ordered a second WT 100 from Nakamura’s sole UK distributor, Turning Technologies.

Rotamic is based in Crediton, Devon, and specialises in complex precise turned parts for customers in industries that include aerospace, medical equipment and precision scientific instruments. It also manufactures it own medical products – pin index yokes and gas probes for hospital gases – and is equally at home working in stainless steels, titanium, magnesium, Nimonics or plastic.

As Rotamic’s owner and managing director Mark Curtis explains, “We tend to get the unusual and difficult parts that other people shy away from. That’s fine by me, I like a challenge. We do a lot of prototyping – which can be anything from one-offs to five or ten off – and a good batch size for us is 30 to 100.

“Our own Rotamic products are available ex-stock and we can make them as we need to replenish that stock. If someone wants one they can have one and if they want a thousand they can have a thousand, and we do bespoke items too.

“Before we bought the WT 100 we were using single-spindle, single-turret lathes – only one of which had a C-axis. I knew we needed to invest in something that would allow us to shorten the whole cycle from buying the material to invoicing the customer.”

After a visit to Turning Technologies in Southam he was convinced that the Nakamura WT 100 was the answer.

“We wanted this type of machine because of the complexity of parts that can potentially come off finished, including milling and drilling. We are trying to finish everything off in one go from bar to component if we can. Around 80% of the parts we make are less than 42mm in diameter, and with a maximum bar size of 42mm the WT 100 is designed around that size of component. It has a small footprint and only takes up the same space as a conventional single-turret, single-spindle machine.”

He says that it wasn’t a decision that was taken lightly. “We had been a loyal customer of another manufacturer for many years, but it was the right thing for us. I didn’t expect to be buying a second machine so soon, but it has been a magnet for work.”

With the twin-spindle, twin-turret setup it is often possible to cut the actual machining time by balancing the operations between the two spindles, but this is just one aspect of the cycle time reductions that are possible.

“The actual machining time could actually be longer than if it had gone on one lathe, a second lathe, one mill, a second mill – but the production time is a lot shorter because there is only one setup, no handling or waiting time, and the part comes off finished and deburred. You are cutting out all the manual operations.”

He says that on the Nakamura a batch may be finished in a day rather than it taking a week or two if it had to be machined sequentially.

“These days, when skilled people are hard to find, and because there is so much competition from the Far East and Eastern Europe, we have to be smarter in how we utilise our labour here – so going for machinery that will enable parts to come off finished is the right way to go. We have identified a lot of parts where we can do that, including those that you would normally expect to make on a mill. It enables us to offer customers quicker turnaround and we can supply them on a kanban, E-ban or JIT basis.

“What we want to do is go from being an engineering focused company to being a sales focused company. I don’t mean that we are taking our eye off the ball in terms of engineering, but we are concentrating on giving the customer more of what they want – and that can be more difficult with conventional machines.”

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For more information please contact:

Jarrod Christie-Smith
Turning Technologies
Tel: 01926 818 418