Established in 1980 as one of the first companies to offer jetwash hoses into the UK market, the WATH Group Ltd has evolved into other industries. Today, it is recognised as a subcontract solution manufacturer to the aerospace, rail, offshore and pharmaceutical sectors whilst maintaining its roots within the jetwash market.
Operating from a fully equipped 40,000sq/ft design and manufacturing facility in Rotherham, the company has invested heavily in machine tool technology from HAAS Automation – MTD travelled to South Yorkshire to find out more.
Matt Bedford from the WATH Group tells us: “We got into CNC machining around two years ago. We started to develop our products around five years ago and we needed a good reliable subcontract business to allow us to develop those products properly. We found that the only people that could do that properly was ourselves. So, we had to learn very quickly how to utilise CNC technology.”
Making the transition from subcontracting work out to bringing the work in-house, Matt comments on the transition: “The biggest benefit is our control. We can control everything from how a product is designed through to how it is manufactured on the shop floor. The quality is also consistent. The engineers that designed the components have a better understanding of how the parts are made. Previously, we used to have a design and subcontractors would give us a price to alter it. Now, we can continually improve the product with small modifications because we have control.”
When asked how the WATH Group Ltd selected its partner for CNC technology, Matt says: “This was primarily down to William, the third generation family coming through the business. He did a lot of the work and came to me to persuade me on why we should invest.”
Speaking with William Bedford and investigating the reasons why the company invested in machine tools from HAAS, William says: “We started working with HAAS roughly 2 years ago, having no experience in CNC machining. We actually started with a HAAS Super Mini Mill 2. This was the first step to bringing our machining in-house and growing our design and production. We found it was a necessity to have that key understanding and to be able to manufacture our products in-house, so we could tweak the designs as and when we needed to. So, it started as a prototyping aspect where we still worked hand-in-hand with local subcontractors, but as we grow we need that support that we didn’t have and we needed to find ourselves.”
“We went from a HAAS Super Mini Mill 2 to a UMC500 within a matter of weeks. This is a full 5-axis simultaneous machine. That jumped us from 3-axis to 5-axis and that is something most people would be scared of, but it was very simple. We had a lot of support from HAAS. Their support and a lot of handholding for a company that had no CNC machining background was paramount. We picked HAAS not just because of the machine tools attractive price but also because of their service and how they supported us and worked with us hand-in-hand from the ground up to what we have now. We are now surrounded by three of HAAS’s best machines, but we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for those initial baby steps.”
“The UMC500 has been our workhorse for the last two years. We didn’t find the transition scary, this is because we are very CAM driven and we are not ‘old school’ machinists. We are engineers, we have electronic engineers with mechanical engineering thrown into the mix. It is because we tackled it from that perspective and the fact that we are very CAD/CAM heavy, we don’t programme long hand at all. There may be a little of this on the lathe, which is a bit of a necessity, but from the 5-axis, we would use Fusion 360. This would allow us to quickly turn around our programming and when combined with the fact we work with Microloc for our workholding – that has allowed us to CAD the job up to prepare for CAM programming. This allows us to undertake everything such as collision avoidance, check the rigidity of the job and more. This all worked so perfectly for us. The UMC500 machine is super rigid. We have done a lot of investigation into different machine tools as there are many competitors out there, but for me, HAAS fit perfectly into that middle bracket for somebody who is not afraid to try and push it a little further and combine that with the support, the maintenance contracts and the true costs on the CNC machine. On this basis, HAAS was the only logical choice.”
