Mori Seiki enables one-hit grinding at Castle Precision Engineering

Castle's chairman and managing director, Marcus Tiefenbrun, explains: "The benefit of the Taiyo Koki is that the part is held vertically, enabling us to completely grind the inside and outside diameters in one operation without resetting. A horizontal grinder would make it necessary for us to reset the part between the inside and outside, a task which is difficult to do with complete accuracy. With the Taiyo Koki we can guarantee wall thicknesses and concentricity and avoid problems such as taper or ovality." The system on the machine automatically finds and updates the datum, and wear control dresses 10 µm off the wheel at each pass. Macro programs determine the number and type of cuts necessary for each operation, and the machine's gap eliminator detects when the gap between the wheel and workpiece is less than about 400 µm, automatically cutting the feedrate, which saves us a lot of time." As well as the Taiyo Koki NVG-8T, Castle Precision has over 40 Mori Seiki machines, including six Mori Seiki SL75 lathes, five SL603B lathes, two NMV5000 5-axis machining centres, a NT5400 DCG multi-tasking machine and a NT6600 DCG multi-tasking machine. Castle Precision produces a wide range of parts including fan discs, blades and rotors for aerospace applications in materials such as steel, titanium, udimet and nimonic. It has almost 60 years of experience and extensive quality approvals, including a SC21 Bronze Award.