New lathe raises performance stakes for S Smith

By upgrading from an Ikegai TUR 25 to the latest TUR 26 mill-turn centre, S Smith (Cowley) has been able to increase productivity by 50%.

By upgrading from an Ikegai TUR 25 to the latest TUR 26 mill-turn centre, S Smith (Cowley) has been able to increase productivity by 50%.

Whereas the Uxbridge based company used to machine alloy steels such as EN24T at 2mm depth of cut on the TUR 25, the TUR 26 can sustain 3mm at a feed rate 25% greater.

Moreover, the new machine is much easier to program and, typically as much as 70% faster to set up due to the 'magic eye' tool setting probe which is now fitted as standard.

Family owned, S Smith has been in business for 55 years having been founded by current managing director David Jones' father following World War II.

David Jones joined the company in 1973 and has progressively developed it into a successful high precision machining company for the railway industry.

The company offers milling and turning facilities for medium to large components, most of which are produced from alloy or stainless steels in the form of billets, castings and forgings.

Explains Jones: "We predominantly supply to UK based manufacturers that in turn, service customers world-wide.

Most components are produced in batches of up to 300 components and entail a combination of CNC milling and turning.

With the Ikegai TUR 26, we can machine up to 480mm diameter and 1000mm between centres and most jobs have fairly long cycles".

He describes how a batch of pivot pins 280 by 80mm took about 90min for each component to be produced out of solid billet with a number of drilled and tapped off-centre holes at one end and a central hole 8mm diameter by 250mm deep.

The main bore was the breakthrough of three cross-drilled holes to form a lubrication manifold for which the TUR 26 was able to produce complete.

The company is a long-term customer of NC Engineering of Watford.

Though its first two Ikegai machines were purchased second-hand, NC Engineering provided any maintenance and backup service.

"Given the type of work that we do, we need a good quality machine", David Jones maintains, "when we bought the first machines we could not afford the price of a new Ikegai.

Whereas a lot of machine agents would have been less than interested in supporting machines they had not supplied, we have always benefited from good service from NC Engineering.

They have even updated the software for us.

So, as a result, when the time came that we could afford new, NC was in pole position".

S Smith's requirements for a machine tool are quite exacting as virtually all the materials are collectively described as tough and demand large amounts of stock removal.

On one particular component produced on a regular basis a billet diameter of 180mm is reduced to 60mm over a substantial part of its length.

Moreover, accuracy requirements are tight.

While the total tolerance on an 80mm diameter pin is 0.080mm, tolerances of +/-0.01mm have been held with comparative ease on the TUR 26.

"When we bought the TUR 26 we could certainly have found the same capacity at a cheaper price", Jones admits.

"However such a machine would almost certainly have had rolling element slides which we would not accept for the type of machining we undertake.

All of our work involves fairly heavy cutting to high accuracy, and here, the Ikegai is ideal".

Although the Ikegai has coated slides, the development of the TUR 26 means significantly higher performance is obtained over the models it superseded.

Compared with S Smith's TUR 25, the new machine has a more powerful 18.5kW main spindle drive and servo motors.

This ensures faster acceleration and rapid traverse speeds of 24 m/min.

"On a like-for-like basis the TUR 26 is capable of chopping around 15 minutes from a 90 minute machining cycle, a significant time saving over a batch of 200 or more", says Jones.

Other features of the new machine include a 'tool-eye' based setup arm which takes around 70% of the time using the previous optical scope method on the older machine.

More important, it removes any setting concern over datum positions and, as a result, the company is now happier with smaller batch quantities.

"We are very pleased with the performance of the Ikegai TUR 26", Jones concluded.

"When it was installed we would have been happy with a simple increase in capacity against the previous model.

However, the new machine provides such major improvements in all of the key areas we utilise and we have been able to use this to achieve good productivity advantages".

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