Hurco Europe Open House notches up orders approaching £1 million

The event held at the company's High Wycombe location saw 70 engineers from 52 manufacturing companies attend and saw the debut of the VMX42HSRTi 5-axis machining centre with 18,000 rpm spindle on a B-axis head, HSK-A63 toolholder interface and a flush rotary C-axis table driven by a torque motor. Seven other machines were under power, including two lathes, all cutting demonstration parts. Another innovation at the Open House was Adaptipath (see video), a module within the Ultipocket option of Hurco's proprietary WinMax 10 conversational programming software. Adaptipath controls and maximises cutter engagement when machining pockets, supports rest machining and allows higher productivity while also extending tool life. Three further software features were presented: Ultimotion high speed machining software, which allows a machine to run faster and more smoothly, with up to 50% time savings reported for complex part production; Universal Rotary, which simplifies swapping programs between different 5-axis machine configurations; and ESF (Extended Shop Floor), which allows customers to check job progress from a mobile phone and enables remote troubleshooting by Hurco engineers. The Open House success comes after a record year for Hurco Europe. Turnover in the financial year to 31 October 2014 was a record £21 million, representing a 5% increase on the previous two years. Over 300 machines were sold during the year, for the third year in a row, including over 50 lathes, some 10% more than in 2012/13. The proportion of new companies buying Hurco equipment was around 40% in 2013/14, similar to the two previous years and a good indicator of sustainable business growth, suggests the company. Hurco's managing director, David Waghorn, says: "Despite the larger proportion of lower cost turning machines delivered this year, the extra turnover resulted partly from selling seven of our biggest DCX-series bridge-type machining centres. "Higher value 5-axis machining centres also sold well, with the VMX42SRTi and VMX60SRTi B-axis models proving most popular, although our trunnion-type configurations are preferred for some applications. "Another factor that raised turnover was a greater willingness by customers to enhance their machine specification with, for example, extra rotary axes, higher spindle speeds, full swarf management, through-tool coolant and probing for parts and tools. "To ensure we keep pace with the higher level of after-sales support that an ever increasing installed base of machines generates, we recently recruited three more service engineers, all of whom started on December 2014." In addition to selling its US parent company's machine tools, for more than a decade Hurco has been sole agent in Britain and Ireland for high precision, 3/5-axis machining centres manufactured by Roeders, Germany. Four were sold from High Wycombe during 2013/14, hallmarks of the machines being linear motors in X, Y and Z, direct drives for the rotary axes, high spindle speeds and exceptional levels of profiling accuracy and surface finish. Video shows capabilities of Adaptipath