One-hit cell manufacturing is the way forward for Unicut

"This is the fifth long term vendor managed contract we have won in the last six months," said Jason Nicholson, joint managing director. "While they involve considerable up-front planning, application development and strict management of any stockholding, we are able to supply parts in days or sometimes within hours following the customer calling for components." With a dedicated cell centred around a Citizen M20 CNC sliding-head turn-mill centre, Unicut is now able to produce up to six totally different component types, depending on batch size, in a single day, on the one machine. The complete range of flow control valves are all made from single size 10 mm diameter stainless steel bar and vary from 4 mm diameter to 9 mm and in length from 75 mm to 140 mm. While each component has a wide variety of different turned features, including some with threads, each has a conical end that provides a metal-to-metal sealing feature, which has very strict tolerances and involves a series of perfectly blended angles to assist flow requirements. Each component has roundness tolerances within 0.005 mm TIR, has to be straight within 0.03 mm and have overall surface finish requirements of 0.4 micrometres CLA. "These components are perfectly suited for continuous production on the Citizen sliding-head machines," said Mr Nicholson. In order to achieve batch requirements that can vary between 20 and 600 parts, Unicut's application team maximised the utilisation of the Citizen M20, which can carry up to 80 tools, to produce all parts from just one setting. By compiling a series of macros linked to each part number, change-over is a simple process of feeding in the relevant part code to the Citizen control and pushing cycle start for immediate selection of the appropriate cutting tools. Unicut developed a similar cell production solution for a made-to-order contract around its recently installed Mazak Integrex 100-IVST turn-mill centre. This machine produces a family of 46 different components around-the-clock from bar with fully automatic unmanned changeover of the machine. "This is definitely the way forward for us," Mr Nicholson added. " Contracts of this type give us security for the future and confidence to invest in the best equipment and services to support the operational requirements. What is important to our customer is that they succeed with competitive prices and quality and realise that delivery will be achieved due to our production methods, even against last minute changes to the laid down schedule."