August saw the installation of another new high speed machining centre to accommodate business growth and increase throughput of tooling and machine parts through the machine shop.
The new Hurco will run alongside the other machine centres, on a shift basis, giving us extra capacity.
Ian Mayo, Manufacturing Manager commented:
“We now have extra capacity on our fleet of high speed machines, it will be run alongside the other machines on a 2 shift basis. We have also recruited 2 extra team members to help us ensure we maximise output on all machines.
It has been set up as part of the dedicated tooling cell where we now have 3 Hurcos and a DMG Mori which will be solely used for manufacturing tooling components and will allow us to hit shorter delivery leadtimes by keeping a constant flow of parts to the tool assembly team.
We will continue to utilise lights out manufacturing and run long running jobs overnight, obviously now though there will be the capabilities to have 4 machines running lights out, thus further increasing our throughput.”
With machines running throughout the night, as part of #lightsoutmanufacturing, with no human intervention, we continue to maintain production levels of up to 90 hours per day!
And this is a relatively straight forward process. It’s all run from offline programs from drawings passed through Design. The program creates a cut size of material, the relevant piece of material is loaded into the machine securely and the machine reads the script of the program and produces the aluminium part accordingly.
Once all parts of the tool are complete, they are passed through to Tool Assembly to be prepped and built ready to be shipped to the customer.
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