The new Nakamura NTRX 300 from the Engineering Technology Group (ETG) has recently been installed at Rotec Ltd. MTDCNC went along to Rotec to take a closer look at the machine in operation…
When posed with the question that ETG claim the NTRX 300 is a great machine, Paul Butler, the Managing Director and owner of Rotec Ltd told MTDCNC: “It is a great machine. We’ve been involved with Nakamura machines for about 12 years and the machines are fantastic, extremely reliable, very fast and very accurate. In our endeavour to move forward, we wanted a machine with all these attributes that we could program directly from our CAM program with full 5-axis turning – and this is why we chose this particular machine.”
The NTRX 300 incorporates a milling head and two rotating spindles. Reasoning on why the company hasn’t opted for a machine with a lower tooling turret, Mr Bulter says: “We see this as a step forward and not backward. We found that just focusing on cycle time wasn’t the right way forward. There is often a lot of downtime between jobs, so the whole idea of this is to apply the CAM system and the machine flexibility to reduce our set-up times. Now, we can set-up complex jobs very quickly and with a barfeed and auxiliary loader we can run these challenging parts unmanned and they come off the machine complete.”
“The challenge has been to get all the technology to work seamlessly for our business to a point where we can trust the machines to run when people aren’t here. The aim is that during the day we can run complex aerospace, automotive and F1 parts and during the night we can look at processing parts that would historically be milled components.”
The company has also invested in the CIMCO technology from ETG. “This software system is networked and its very clever because it’s not based upon one machine tool brand, so we have Chiron, Star, Citizen, Nakamura and DMG machines and they are all linked up to the system. It gives us a very good view of our efficiency and we have it in a pictorial view so we can instantly see over the last 12 hours, 24 hours, 1 moth or 2 months where we have been efficient. We can also generate reports for our meetings, so we can analyse performance.”
