Finishing and deburring machine removes anomaly

A substantial investment in a state-of-the-art Grindingmaster surface finishing/deburring system at SPS Aerostructures has met with the approval of its major aerospace clients.

A substantial investment in a state-of-the-art Grindingmaster surface finishing/deburring system at SPS Aerostructures has met with the approval of its major aerospace clients.

With a client base consisting of most of the world's leading aerospace manufacturers, SPS Aerostructures is acutely aware of the need to deliver components of the highest quality, 100 per cent of the time and on schedule.

A reliance on manual deburring was, therefore, somewhat of an anomaly at the company's sheet metal fabrication and structural assembly division in Annesley, Nottinghamshire.

This recently-built facility operates the latest flow-line manufacturing techniques but manual deburring was proving to be inefficient and could not provide the guarantee of quality required.

The solution was provided by deburring and surface finishing specialist Ellesco.

The Christchurch, Dorset-based company proposed the installation of a Timesavers multi-directional, rotary abrasive disc, deburring system manufactured by Grindingmaster.

This system is a wet process and deburrs and finishes the cut edges of parts in all directions in a single pass.

The actual surface of the component also undergoes some improvements, including cleaning, during the process.

Components are loaded onto the vacuum table at the front of the machine, deburred and then dried before exiting the rear of the machine where, in the case of SPS, they are transferred to an integrated conveyor, that delivers them back to the operator.

David Osborne, SPS Aerostructure's Cell Manager, says: "The decision to invest in the Timesavers machines was part of our internally driven process of continuous quality improvement.

We were finding that over a shift using manual deburring techniques it was extremely difficult to maintain a consistent level of quality with component finishes varying between employees.

This situation was not good enough to meet our own internally driven quality processes, so we had to investigate alternatives." Health and safety was also a major issue for SPS Aerostructures as, with up to 12 men operating manual orbital sanding equipment, the atmosphere in the working area was contaminated with dust and noise pollution.

"It was an existing customer of ours, who was already using Timesavers equipment who suggested we considered this approach.

Our initial plan was to install one machine to deburr all of our aluminium parts with a second machine for use on steel and titanium parts being part of a more long-term plan." However, such was the success of the first machine in reducing manual operations and delivering consistent component quality and improving productivity, that SPS brought forward this long-term plan and a second machine was in-situ within three months of the first being installed.

The support of Ellesco and its team of engineers aided the ramp up of production.

"We had superb support and service from Ellesco," says David Osborne.

"They gave us all the training we required and they were happy for someone to remain on-site until SPS was happy that all our operators were fully-conversant with the machine and its systems." Following the installation SPS was pleasantly surprised by the performance of the Timesavers machines.

Initially it had been envisaged that, given the volume of work being produced both machines would operate on a three-shift system.

This has proved not to be the case with two shifts providing ample time to deburr and finish all of SPS's production requirements.

Some of these productivity gains have come about as a direct result of the controllability and consistency of the Timesavers machines.

Thanks to the plc control, components are processed consistently in line with the machine settings, which can include up to 999 different parameter combinations which are set according to duty - ie bad rag or light lick-over - and material to be processed.

The operator/programmer has infinite control over parameters such as conveyor speed, disc rotation speed, disc pressure, grinding head pressure, coolant flow rates, and material thickness amongst others.

Further benefits in production control are now being witnessed by SPS as David Osborne explains: "Parts now come straight from our lasers or routers and are delivered directly to the Timesavers.

This is eliminating all of our holding/waiting of material and reducing work in progress dramatically.

At the same time the flow of work through the factory is now uninterrupted and the bottleneck that was manual deburring has been eliminated.".

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