Hardinge Viper orders worth £3 million destined for China and India

The contracts are from leading aero engine manufacturers in China and India. The Chinese order (ready to ship) is a stand-alone manually operated Bridgeport FGC-2 flexible grinding centre. The Indian order (currently in build) is for a fully integrated robotised cell around a similar machine. The Chinese contract for the manually loaded FGC-2 version required the machine to provide multi-face grinding of all the radial areas of the NGV. By combining a formed cubic boron nitride (CBN) wheel in the 16 position automatic wheel changing system a special groove that was previously hard-turned as a separate operation was able to be included by Hardinge in the same cycle. The FGC-2 will produce NGVs in a cycle time of less than 45 minutes. The fully automatic FGC-2 cell due for delivery to India will halve the processing time of NGVs compared to existing methods. It will produce batches of engine sets and incorporates a Güdel gantry loader with Kuka robot and a Hexagon co-ordinate measuring machine (CMM). The CMM initially establishes the 'best-fit' of the throat area of the NGV raw casting to maximise air flow from which the machining datum is created by grinding to achieve the flow. Following the grinding cycle the CMM checks conformance and the part is automatically returned to the loading station after any corrective grinding takes place, for instance due to excessive casting stock levels. The application development and build for both machines has been at the Hardinge Machine Tools facility in Leicester.