Five-axis specialist chooses Open Mind CAM

Established in 1977, when Ross Pinchin took over his father Bill's business in 1996, Progressive was a one-man band operating a couple of milling machines and a manual lathe, with a just a single CNC turning centre and machining centre. Today, he is the managing director of a 20-employee business operating across two sites in the Newbury area. "We needed to change direction and this required investment in new machine tools. Since 2000, we gradually employed new CNC technology to cater for the diverse customer needs. However, with the increasing complexity of components, we realised the need for 5-axis machining," he explains. By the middle of the 2000s, the Newbury-based company built a customer base in the F1, medical, oil and gas, fibre optics, defence, aerospace and electronics industries. Working in sectors with increasingly complex component designs that required multiple set-ups, the business decided to commit to 5-axis machining in 2007, with the company acquiring its first 5-axis machining centre, a DMG DMU50evo Linear. "When we decided upon the DMG machine, we realised we had to consider a suitable 5-axis CAM package. Our current package wasn't capable of meeting our needs, so we reviewed the marketplace and despite talking to the three or four main software vendors, the name Open Mind kept popping up among our peers," Mr Pinchin recalls. "When we discussed our increasingly heavy involvement in the F1 sector with Open Mind and the machining of difficult 5-axis components, they took us to visit companies producing similar components for the F1 sector. We also visited a leading F1 team and when we realised they had conducted an in-depth feasibility study among CAM vendors, which Open Mind was the clear winner, our decision was all but made. An additional recommendation from DMG finalised the decision and when the DMG machine arrived in June 2007, we simultaneously took delivery of the hyperMILL CAM package from Open Mind." Since 2007, the leading F1 subcontractor has acquired an additional four DMG 5-axis machining centres that include a DMU80P, two DMU70evo Linear machines and an additional DMU50evo. All new machines have arrived with an additional seat of hyperMILL, taking the hyperMILL count to five seats. However, this has now been extended to seven seats, with the latest two seats arriving in December 2010. The company has also recently trialled, and bought, the new hyperMAXX toolpath optimisation package.