The de Havilland Engineering Group offers a comprehensive supply of small to large metal fabrications from its Stonehouse facility and due to the broad size range of its work, the business has invested in machine tools from Hurco.
Heavy fabrication contracts cover industry sectors such as oil and gas, water, and site installations, as well as the marine engineering, aerospace, wind turbine, hydrogen generation and recycling industries. As a result, the variety of materials processed ranges from light plastics to stainless and super duplex.
The latest investment is a pair of machine tools from Hurco. First to arrive was a TM10i 2-axis lathe with an 81mm spindle bore and two weeks later it was followed by a VM20i 3-axis vertical machining centre. Both machines have a Windows-based control system with industry-leading conversational programming software, Max 5.
Lewis Chandler, lead operator of the machines said: “The capacity of the machines is large considering their small footprint and price point – it has worked out really well. The conversational programming is very easy to use. It asks you what you want, you type in the figures and it draws it up for you automatically. It’s brilliant”.
He added that most machining cycles at de Havilland Group are generated directly at the controls. In the past, they used G-code programming, which requires a lot of calculations and longhand typing. It was becoming difficult to recruit operators with experience.
Menu-driven programming and mobile phone-style manipulation of images on the touch screen, however, are intuitive. Moreover, having a lathe and a mill with the same easy system for creating machining cycles makes training new operators much easier and they can swap seamlessly between machines.
Mr Chandler said: “The machining centre has a 10,000 rpm, 15kW spindle, which is high for this size and class of machine and not very common unless you pay extra for it. It enables efficient machining of aluminium, plastics and lighter materials. Also, there is a lot of torque at the low end of the speed range, allowing us to tackle difficult materials such as tougher steels and duplex productively.”
