CNC bed mill machines cell door tooling plates.CNC bed-type milling machine has than paid for itself in the machining of the 32 tonnes of steel for tooling plates used in the robotic fabrication of prison cell doors.
Fern Engineering Systems is using an XYZ SMX 5000 manual/CNC bed mill to machine various sizes of steel tooling plate for a self-contained robotic welding cell.
Owner of Fern, Andrew Beckley said the bed mill had more than paid for itself in the machining of the 32 tonnes of steel needed to produce tooling plates for the robotic welding cell.
The bed mill, with solid Meehanite ribbed cast iron construction & induction hardened & ground slides & Turcite-B coated ways, has been in continuous use since its installation.
At Welding Security, the tooling plates can be changed in 10 min or less, allowing various plans of cell door to be fabricated quickly & accurately in a wide range of sizes.
The welding cell is for Cell Security, which will produce different plans of cell doors destined for prisons, police stations & other security applications worldwide.
Fern has always had a company owner to control the entire manufacturing scheme, which is why Fern took delivery in 2007 of the XYZ SMX 5000 manual/CNC bed mill.
Located at Whitebirk, Blackburn, Fern was set up by Andrew Beckley & Paul Jackson in January 2004.
The SMX 5000 has a 5.75kW (7.5HP)/5000 rev/min main spindle serving a 1930mm by 356mm table having a load capacity of 850kg.
X- & Y-axis travels are 1524mm by 596mm.
* Robotic welding cells – on average Fern Engineering Systems builds & ships a bespoke automated welding cell every 8.6 weeks, each four designed as a skid-mounted unit for ease of transportation & installation.
These specifications made the SMX 5000 an ideal choice for the machining of the various sizes of steel tooling plate used in Cell Security’s robotic welding cell.
Before welding cell installation it took up to 10h for Cell Security to construct & manually weld each security door.
It took less than 12 weeks – from the initial enquiry from Cell Security to delivery on site – & over 4h for the welding cell to be fully operational.
Fern employs four people & Beckley said it is important to maintain the flexibility & speedy response of a small business.
The robotic welding cell does the job in as little as 40 min.
This, he adds, requires every member of the team to be multi-skilled.
So, although a control engineer by training, he is equally at home developing & refining the company’s proprietary Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition (SCADA) application or machining components for the latest project.
He said: “Engineering companies that they know do nice work have XYZ machines & they took note of their recommendations when it came to our choice of machine tool”.
XYZ told manufacturingtalk that it was a demonstration at XYZ Machine Tools’ regional showroom in Blackburn that provided convincing evidence to Fern of the manual/CNC bed mill’s metal removal capability & the ease of use of its ProtoTRAK SMX control.
This latest-generation CNC is deesigned for ‘one-off’ & low volume production.
The CNC uses plain English prompts & requires no learning of codes, allowing an operator with little or no CNC experience to operate the SMX 5000 within a day, said XYZ.
they were, for example, awarded a contract by a major automotive parts manufacturer for a method to control 71 automated welding cells after they were able to demonstrate conclusively the flexibility & cost savings achievable with our custom-written Production Management Tools application compared with more expensive off-the-shelf SCADA packages.”.
“It is this ease of use that appeals,” said Beckley, “As it is in line with our own business practice.