This month 25 years ago - July 1988

Our first comment article this month highlights some small and medium-sized subcontractors' success at NatWest bank's Engineering Marketing Awards. The hook on which that year's keynote speech was hung was the coming single European market, when competition would intensify. While Machinery observed that engineering companies at large were not good marketers, we congratulated the winners. We stuck with subcontractors in our second July issue's comment piece. Automation of the large flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) type, favoured by OEMs and based around parts having similar geometry, was, we said, difficult for such companies to justify. A US initiative offered an example. Subcontractors were to share the capacity of so-called FlexCIM automated production set-ups, allowing automated manufacture of short runs at a cost-effective price, since high utilisation of the facility would be achieved. Some 30+ FlexCIMs were planned – the first was to be in Meadville, Pennsylvania, to be up and running by 1 July 1989. It was an idea that the UK should follow, we suggested. In the news pages, Cincinnati Milacron, which then had a UK manufacturing base, says it has launched the fastest machining centre in the world. Its horizontal spindle, two-pallet HPMC (high performance machining centre) offers 30 m/min rapids, 15,000 rpm spindle, 2 sec tool change (5.6 chip to chip) and 2 sec pallet index. Target parts were the increasing number of aluminium components in the automotive sector. Bad news comes from creep-feed grinding specialist Ex-Cell-O, however, which is to close its Leicester factory, with the loss of 250 jobs. More news from the machine tool sector saw Arbroath-based, US-owned Giddings & Lewis Fraser becoming plain Giddings & Lewis. This accompanies a change of business model, as Arbroath services the UK and Europe with an integration service for large machine tools, taking in all manufacturers' machines, to create automated FMSs. At West Country-based press brake and guillotine maker Edwards Pearson, the just in time (JIT) improvements started under 600 Group ownership have matured now it is within Dolk Industries, such that a machine can be completed in three to four weeks from receipt of materials. Edwards Pearson has today been subsumed within Swiss firm Bystronic. JIT production, a buzzword at this time, is also touched on in a feature this month about metal stockholders. Such companies are investing in sophisticated sawing equipment and more to service their customers JIT demands, we note. Added value services they are described as; basically, supplying accurately cut raw material or first stage machined parts on short lead times, for example. The lead story of the first issue this month involves the manufacture of brake pads. At the Cleckheaton, Yorkshire factory of Mintex Don (now part of TMD Friction Group), a through-feed grinding system has been installed to deliver the more precise parts required for automated assembly. A single Linear Abrasives' machine is capable of producing three-quarters of the 400,000 pad made each week to a flatness of 0.03 mm TIR and accuracy of ± 0.1 mm thickness. Another feature covered a UK machine tool development. Helped by government funding, Holroyd (now part of Chinese-owned Precision Technology Group – PTG) developed a cutter grinding machine, the CS 260E, for rotor milling cutters used on the company's 2E CNC rotor milling machine. French CNC maker NUM unveiled its low-cost unit, the 720. Machinery interviews NUM's top man, Yves Saulnier, about it. The company has great ambitions for this unit. And finally, Machinery publishes one of its international reports, this one on Italy's machine tool industry. Almost 100 Italian machine tool brands were offered in the UK at that time. Events this month [] Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, North Sea (pictured) []Barbara Woodhouse, dog-trainer, dies []USS Vincennes shoots down Iranian jet in Gulf – 290 perish []Michael Jackson tours UK []Paddy Ashdown becomes Lib-Dem leader []Seve Ballesterous wins British Open First published in July 2013