Unicut Precision has almost trebled its annual turnover in recent years and invested £1.7 million in the last 24 months alone on new production and inspection equipment.
About half of the Welwyn Garden City firm's investment went on two more Cincom sliding-head lathes and two additional Miyano fixed-head lathes from Citizen Machinery UK, bringing the totals of the bar-fed lathes on site to 24 and 11 respectively.
The remaining funds were used to purchase three new items of inspection equipment and to extend the automatic pallet storage and retrieval system linking three 5-axis machining centres on site.
Jason Nicholson, Unicut Precision's Managing Director, commented: “Efficient production is not just down to automation but also depends on how well you monitor the machine tools on the shop floor and use the data to make informed decisions.
"We use PSL Datatrack Production Control Software to help with this and will shortly be progressing from manual extraction of production data from our machine tool controls to directly downloading it over a network for remote monitoring.”
Regarding turning, which currently accounts for 85% of Unicut’s turnover, he said that standardisation on Citizen lathes with their user-friendly, intuitive Mitsubishi controls greatly helps to mitigate the current shortage of skilled setter-operators, which he sees as a worldwide problem.
The use of this CNC system throughout the factory also speeds up the training of staff and allows operators to swap easily between machines.
The latest turning centre additions were two 65mm bar capacity Miyano BNE-65MYY models, each featuring a pair of Y-axis turrets and the latest Mitsubishi 15-inch touchscreen control.
They joined five smaller fixed-head lathes in the same series to form a seven-machine cell for producing hydraulic and pneumatic components in large volumes, typically from 2,000 to 10,000-off.
Read the full, unabridged article in the latest edition of the MTDCNC magazine: https://lnkd.in/esDxPuyH
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Citizen Machinery UK, Edward James, Joanna Greene, Craig Geeson, Neil Vine, Rob Sibbald, Michael Bellingham, James Taylor, Rebecca Hancock, Paul North, David Whitworth, Timothy Baldwin, Clive Littlechild, Warren Garratt, James Nicholson, Arron Lewis, Paul Simister, Elliott Carpenter, Eric Tollett, Elliott Carpenter, Cornelia Jones, Jake Williams
Unicut Precision, Jason Nicholson, Philip Chambers, Francis Davies, TYLER BOWN, Luke Markwick, Luke Morrice, Sultan Eser, Fernando Gavioli, Dawood Akhtar
PSL Datatrack Production Control Software, Geoff Gartland, Tara Gartland
Good morning. what can we do for this Project?, what is neccesary?