Trac installs £2 million VIPER grinding cell

The installation follows Trac Group's winning of a long-term contract to produce four types of nickel alloy turbine vane for a leading European power generation company. The contract will last well into the next decade and is for the machining of four varieties of larger vane for power generation. The system was installed at the end of 2008 in a new satellite factory opposite Trac's main production facility in Crewe. Now in full production, it will grind a total of 186 engine sets of vanes during the life of the contract. NCMT, Makino's agent in Britain and Ireland, undertook turnkey responsibility for the supply of a Makino A99e machining centre and the process for producing the vanes. Included in the package were programs, grinding wheels, workpiece fixtures and a Fanuc M-900/A 6-axis robot for exchanging fixtured components automatically. The remainder of the production cell comprises two TEK4 deep hole EDM drilling machines, two die-sink EDM machines from Agie Charmilles and a Hexagon/DEA co-ordinate measuring machine. Trac had already installed a smaller Makino A55 VIPER grinding machine, to supplement conventional 5-axis CNC creep- feed grinding on Blohm and Mägerle grinders, in 2004. A year later, a similar size Makino iGrinder G5, a machine purpose-built from the ground up for VIPER grinding, was installed to meet a further increase in demand.