The Japanese machine tool manufacturer, Brother, has reduced the UK price of its entry-level TC-S2A CNC drill-tap centre to under £30,000 including installation, training and 12-month parts and labour warranty.
Avalable in the UK from Whitehouse Machine Tools, one of the first to benefit is Oberon Performance, Havant, which in April 2007 replaced a 5-axis vertical machining centre from another supplier with a 3-axis TC-S2A for the manufacture of high-quality, aluminium parts for the motorcycle aftermarket.
It proved impossible to achieve a good surface finish on the 5-axis machine, and cycle times were more than double those on the TC-S2A. This is a classic problem with 5-axis machines, which are only as fast as their slowest rotary axis. Oberon could not achieve sufficiently high productivity for economical series production of typically 30-off.
The company researched the market for a replacement, temporarily installing another 3-axis VMC to give them time to find the right machine. He was looking for a compact, simply constructed, totally reliable machine with high speeds and feeds for cutting aluminium billet productively. At the outset, he thought that 30-taper drill-tap centres, such as those offered by Brother, were not robust enough for continuous milling, albeit of aluminium.
But despite the drill-tap centre being one-third the price of the previous VMC, it produces “astronomically better surface finish”, according to Steve Evans and his co-director, Steve Street, joint owners of Oberon and both motorcycle enthusiasts.
Mr Evans concluded: “The Brother machine was commissioned in one hour and we were straight into production, transferring programs from the temporary VMC with just a few M-code changes. The improvement in quality was immediately obvious. In the first couple of months we put on around 30 different jobs.
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