UK subcontractor wins turning work back from Asia

Three CNC sliding-headstock lathes, operating continuously on three shifts enabled UK subcontractor to win back automotive work from Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers.

Set up in January 2003, Coventry-based Turned Parts Warehouse has enjoyed considerable business success with its three CNC sliding-headstock lathes, two of them from Star Micronics GB.

The machines, which operate continuously throughout the year except Christmas day, have allowed the subcontractor to win automotive work from Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers, which anecdotal evidence suggests are increasingly letting down direct line feeders that supply components straight to the production lines of major automotive manufacturers in the UK.

A complete stoppage at Nissan's Sunderland plant, for example, costs the company GBP 6,000 per minute, so it is crucial that components of the correct quality are supplied on time.

While unit production costs are low in the Far East, lead-time is typically long at six to eight weeks, five of which are spent shipping the components.

Commented Turned Parts Warehouse joint owner, Tim Bayliss, "Most of the time the system works, but occasionally the wheels fall off.

Suddenly the direct line feeder finds that parts have not arrived or are out of tolerance, and we receive an urgent request for a relatively small quantity of a few thousand components to be delivered in a couple of days He cited a recent example where a line feeder realised on a Wednesday afternoon that a car production line would run out of 5BA square nuts within 24 hours.

The drawing was faxed through to Turned Parts Warehouse and the program was entered in less than an hour on the shop floor at the Star SA-16s Fanuc control.

The first 500 parts were delivered in time to avert stoppage of the car production line, with the balance of 2,500 delivered the following day.

Amazingly, the components were also plated within this time frame.

Continued Bayliss, "Another problem the line feeding companies have is that of the 900 or so line items they supply to an automotive OEM, five per cent are required in relatively small volumes.

Far Eastern subcontractors are not interested in orders of less than 30,000, so shorter batch work generally stays within the UK and we frequently win this business." When he established the company with co-owner, Ian Northcott, on the back of a long-term Nissan contract for 400,000 turned body parts per year, neither had any idea that sporadic rush jobs for volume car builders would account for 20 per cent of turnover.

The welcome boost to the business is especially attractive as the subcontractor is able to charge a premium for guaranteeing quick delivery.

Another major advantage is that it gives Turned Parts Warehouse a foot in the door and a chance to quote for producing larger volumes, which sometimes they win back from the Far East.

The components produced by the Coventry firm, predominantly steel nuts and bolts, regularly find their way into Premier Automotive Group vehicles (Ford, Volvo, Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover) as well as practically every other vehicle manufactured in the UK.

Many of the contracts are placed by a sister company, headed by Mr Bayliss, which houses the Turned Parts Warehouse operation.

Northcott was for 18 years the works manager of a Midlands engineering company operating multi-spindle cam automatics and CNC sliding-headstock lathes.

He was therefore ideally placed to recognise the strengths of the latter machines and to witness large volume production of relatively simple turned components on multis inexorably being lost to overseas companies.

He therefore decided to base his new business on higher added-value production of components on CNC sliders in batch sizes ranging up to 50,000-off.

Often the reason that a rush job has been received is unclear, as it is not in the direct line feeders interests to divulge sensitive commercial information.

However, Northcott mentioned a couple of recent examples where it was clear that the previous suppliers performance had been unsatisfactory.

One involved producing a family of EN16T banjo bolts for gearboxes from 16mm and 20 mm diameter bar.

He believes that the components were previously produced by a UK subcontractor that wanted to increase the price.

Produced on a Star SR-32 sliding-headstock lathe purchased in December 2003, the components require drilling, turning, screwcutting and hexagon milling followed by back chamfering and part-off with the support of the sub spindle.

Cycle time is 1.5 minutes.

The other example is a 67mm long adjuster bolt that acts as a pulley tensioner in a car engine.

This was previously supplied from China but is now produced by Turned Parts Warehouse on its Star SA-16 from 14mm diameter EN16T bar.

Operations include turning, screwcutting, parting-off in the main spindle while in the sub spindle the previously-turned part is simultaneously centred and drilled, all in a cycle time of under half a minute.

Around 80 per cent of production involves thread cutting and half of all components is machined using the sub-spindle on the Star lathes, either to support the component during part-off to avoid pip formation or for in-cycle reverse-end machining.

Many components require cross-machining using the driven tooling, especially as only round bar is used so bolt and nut hexagons have to be milled.

Not all parts are destined for the automotive industry; a third are supplied for compressor manufacture and safety-critical offshore applications as well as to the construction and white goods sectors.

If one fifth of a business is based on manufacturing components that are required urgently by customers, especially if that business represents jam rather than bread and butter, a high level of service and support is needed from the supplier of the machine tools.

This exactly what Turned Parts Warehouse receives from Star GB.

Northcott enthuses about its telephone helpline, which normally sorts out the problem.

"The big advantage is that the lathe is up and running quickly and there is no call-out charge either he said.

"On the rare occasion that we need an engineer on site, he normally arrives within 24 hours.

Star also holds comprehensive stocks of spares such as collets and guide bushes, which is important when there is an urgent requirement for turning a new size of bar As to the future, Northcott says that it will be more of the same at Turned Parts Warehouse, systematically building up the business and installing more sliding-headstock autos to the point where, in the foreseeable future, he operates eight machines round the clock.

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