Metal spinners benefit from water jet ownership

Metal Spinners Group has been able to make great cost savings and guarantee that the product is right everytime since purchasing its own waterjet cutting machine.

Metal Spinners Group has been able to make great cost savings and guarantee that the product is right everytime since purchasing its own Ingersoll-Rand Streamline equipped waterjet cutting machine.

It is used to carry out aperture cutting in high-value spun products that previously had to be sub-contracted out to specialist companies.

Formed in 1953 and now with production facilities in Newcastle and Birmingham, Metal Spinners Group has the largest range of metalspinning capabilities in Europe.

Utilising CNC and PNC spinning lathes, the company processes a wide range of materials from 1mm to 40mm thick, with spun diameters up to 4500mm.

The Ingersoll-Rand equipped machine is used at Metal Spinners Newcastle base on an ever-expanding variety of high-value products for blue-chip customers that include end plates for hospital body scanners.

The waterjet machine, manufactured by Aliko Automation Oy of Finland and supplied by Messer Griesheim of Cramlington, Northumberland, is powered by an Ingersoll-Rand 50HP Streamline High Pressure Intensifier that produces a working pressure of 3,800bar (55,000 lb/in2) to give a very high quality of cut.

A bed size of 3metres x 3metres allows Metal Spinners to cut components typically up to 2.2 metres diameter.

The machine is also equipped with an inbuilt abrasive removal system that pumps out heavy debris through a filtration system and returns the water back to the tank for reuse.

Metal Spinners Group decided to purchase its own waterjet cutting machine when the cost of subcontract cutting on its high value stainless steel, aluminium and copper products became increasingly expensive and wanted to ensure that the cutting process was controlled in-house to improve customer service.

The Ingersoll-Rand streamline equipped machine has proved to be a great asset to Metal Spinners: "There is a great comfort factor in using waterjet cutting," enthused David Ashley, Project Engineer at Metalspinners.

"We know we will get a quality product every time and we are not putting the product at risk by cutting it and possibly needing to have it re-worked as we do with other methods.

Of course that's in addition to the cost of material we could lose if it was wrong.

The accuracy of waterjet cutting is a key feature - we are able to work to within 0.2 mm over the whole bed size.

Obviously this is a very important feature when you have already put a lot of effort into spinning the component to get it to that stage." As well as guaranteeing accuracy and quality of cut, the new streamline equipped machine has provided great cost savings and has generated new interest from customers, as endorsed by Ashley: "Before we bought our own waterjet machine we were having to subcontract out the work and it was costing us a fortune.

Now, as customers discover we are able to offer the added value service of waterjet cutting, it is bringing in more orders and has provided us with a far greater capacity of work.".

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