As a manufacturer of aerospace fuel system components, Havant company Andair has now purchased a new Miyano turning centre. Miyano CNC lathes from Citizen Machinery UK have underpinned the production of parts since January 2005 at Andair.
The company has bought a total of seven Miyanos, the latest being the first 80mm bar capacity ABX lathe to be installed in the UK. It arrived on the shop floor in June 2020 equipped with an Iemca KID 80 short bar magazine.
Owen Phillips said: “Production efficiency used to be lower because we could only manufacture a limited number of components from a billet. In the case of the aluminium body for an oil-air separator, we could only produce one per billet. Now, these parts can be machined from bar using the 80mm capacity lathe.”
The other lathes in the factory all have twin turrets and Owen had ordered a similar specification for the 80mm model. Due to the cancellation of the MACH 2020 machine tool exhibition, Citizen Machinery had a triple-turret ABX-80THY 12-axis model that it had intended to launch at the show. Owen had never used a lathe of that configuration before but decided to buy it as it was available immediately.
He enthused: “I would not buy another twin-turret machine in future, because having three turrets is more productive. It is no problem to transfer work to the more complex lathe, as a new program can be checked easily using the manual retrace function in the control.”
About 60 different parts have so far been produced on the new lathe, all from 3 inch diameter bar. In fact, in one instance where a customer required a large valve machined from a 4.5 inch diameter billet, Owen turned the end of it down to 80mm so that it could be machined in the collet.
In the case of the oil-air separator body, it is now possible to machine five from bar in 30 minutes whereas before, with an operator loading billets manually into the chuck of an ABX-64SYY, it took at least 45 minutes to achieve the same output. In other words, productivity has been boosted by more than 50 percent. A further benefit to Andair is that the two 64mm bar lathes can now be devoted to the collet work for which they were originally intended.
