Drill and tap centre price drop underlines benefits

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.