Fighter builders award tooling contract

Gewefa has won a major contract to provide toolholders for assembly machining on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter from consortium of Lockheed Martin and partner companies.

Corsham based Gewefa UK and its parent company Gewefa GmbH (supported by Pibomulti as agents in the USA), has won a major contract to provide toolholders for assembly machining on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) project currently under way for the US Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, UK Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

The order, for high precision Gewefa RadAx hydraulic chuck toolholders, has been placed by the Trans Atlantic consortium of Lockheed Martin - the prime contractor - and partner companies BAe Systems and Northrop Grumman.

The toolholder contract is initially for application on the manufacture of 22 development aircraft for the Systems Development and Demonstration phase of the JSF project.

Further, the long term volume manufacturing requirement is substantial in the Low-Rate Initial Production (LRIP) and full production phases of the programme.

Gewefa's first phase will be supplied to BAe Systems in Samlesbury near Blackburn (UK), to Lockheed Martin plants in Fort Worth Texas and Palmdale California and to the Northrop Grumman operation in El Segundo, California, The JSF is the world's largest ever military aircraft development and in total it is anticipated that the USA and UK's requirements will be for around 2,600 aircraft, based on three variants.

In addition as many as a further 3,000 aircraft could be built for countries currently operating aircraft that the JSF is designed to replace - notably the A-10, Harrier, F-16 and F/A-18.

"This is perhaps the most significant order in Gewefa UK's 12 year history," explains managing director Graham Horwood.

"We have in that time built up excellent relationships with the BAe Systems plant in Samlesbury.

For this stage of the contract we had to tender for the business against international competition and have shown that Gewefa can provide toolholding and support to not only BAe Systems but its United States JSF partners as well." Part of the tender process involved a Gewefa UK team presenting to over 40 BAe Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman engineers, technical personnel and procurement representatives in Fort Worth.

"We demonstrated not only our technical capabilities but also the capacity of the manufacturing team in Germany as well as the sales co-ordination, logistical and warehousing support that the Gewefa team we will be offering the consortium from Corsham (Gewefa UK) and through Pibomulti in the United States," concludes Graham Horwood.

The F-35 JSF team will have the responsibility for constructing three variants of the aircraft to exacting standards.

Gewefa equipment in conjunction with the new Dorries Scharman Technologies assembly machining centres with their high precision and sustained accuracy are a key element of the manufacturing process.

The Gewefa RadAx products offer the ability to make adjustments from the side of the tool for ease of pre-setting, significantly saving on tool changing and adjustment times.

Gewefa UK is the UK subsidiary of Gewefa GmbH based in Burladingen, Southern Germany.

In addition to selling the comprehensive Gewefa toolholding range, the organisation is also the UK distributor for a range of products allied to toolholding, notably Pibomulti speed increasers and driven tools and products from EWS, Nann and PCM Willen.

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