Product category:
Vertical machining centres (VMC)
News Release from: Chiron Werke UK | Subject: FZ12W Magnum vertical machining centre
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 30 March 2001
Machining centre clears valve bottleneck
The introduction of one-hit valve body machining on a Chiron FZ12W Magnum vertical machining centre at Caradon Mira has cleared a production bottleneck at the Cheltenham company.
The introduction of one-hit valve body machining on a Chiron FZ12W Magnum vertical machining centre at Caradon Mira, the UK market-leading shower manufacturing division of Caradon Plumbing Solutions, has not only generated the desired levels of throughput and accuracy, but also cleared a production bottleneck at the Cheltenham company Supplied by Chiron Werke UK, the Magnum complements Caradon's existing Chiron FZ12W VMC which, as production engineer Richard Higgs explains, has served the company well over the past 10 years or so
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 20 Jun 2000 at 8.00am (UK)
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"On its own, however, the existing 12-tool Chiron VMC couldn't cope with the increasing volumes of work," he says.
"The family of valve bodies, which are brass castings, are processed in batches of 60 to 100 and require a number of operations - including a mixture of internal and external milling, drilling and tapping tasks.
"We needed a machine that could prevent the bottleneck and was flexible enough to meet our demands for one-hit machining.
We consider that the more machining operations we can complete at a single set-up then the better it is in terms of both volume and accuracy." While speed of operation also came into machine selection, so did the desire for common tooling and programming, and guaranteed service back-up.
Meeting those demands, the FZ12W Magnum is capable of milling at 250 cm3/min, drilling 36 mm diameter and M24 tapping.
This is achieved through a 20-tool magazine which boasts fast tool change time - 0.9 sec with chip-to-chip achieved within 2.4 sec - coupled with spindle speeds of up to 20,000 revs/min from the 45 kW motor.
Additionally, the machine was fitted with rotary chucks and clamped counter bearings with trunnion fixtures for five-axis working, complementing the X, Y and Z axes travels of 550 mm by 300 mm by 425 mm, with 190 mm to 615 mm between spindle taper and table.
And the workpiece changer provides quick and simultaneous load/unload during machining.
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