Unicut installs fourth high-spec Citizen

The machine, to be installed within four weeks of order by Citizen Machinery UK, is the fourth M32 installed at the Welwyn Garden City subcontract precision machinist. It will join 18 other Citizen sliding-head machines of various bar capacities, but all with high specifications to meet the wide variety of turned-milled parts produced in single operational cycles passing through the production shop. The new M32-V is heavily feature enabled, including the 2,000 psi CoolBlaster coolant system, IEMCA bar feed, mist extraction and automatic off-loading. The specification will enable Unicut to perform more general, single operational cycles involving turning and milling, freeing up certain other machine installations that will be used for more dedicated cycles in cell type configurations. For example, a rapidly growing part of the business is the supply of multiples of family part groupings under vendor managed contracts. "Through our investment programme, we are finding we are becoming increasingly competitive in winning contracts, especially from overseas, helped by the value of sterling, the cost of fuel and shipping, a reluctance to supply smaller batch quantities and uncertainty of supply," explained Jason Nicholson, managing director. The Citizen M32-V has high levels of flexibility helped by two Y-axis crossfeeds, which Unicut's setters are well able to exploit to combine multiples of different features of a complex component into single cycle operations. The machine is able to carry up to 80 tools, of which 20 are driven, and is able to cut with three tools simultaneously at the main and sub-spindle.