Davturn, a small family-owned precision sub-contract machinist based in Bromsgrove has found increasing its production capability by installing a Miyano BNE-51SY6 turn-mill centre has added fuel to the burning desire to expand the five-people business into new larger premises. As a result, managing director Mark Birley maintains, such has been the impact of the new machine that moving premises will then allow further Miyano installations by Citizen Machinery UK to increase its operational capability.
He said: “We installed the multi-axis 51 mm bar size Miyano BNE-51SY6 in June to join our existing Miyano BNA-42DHY which had already proven to be an outstanding success for the business since its installation in 2012. At that time it enabled us to increase the size of bar we machine from our bank of five sliding head machines which limited our capacity to 32 mm. Now, with a 51 mm capacity this has immediately brought in a host of new orders.”
Mark Birley, (left) Managing Director of Davturn and son Matthew who has chosen the skills of machine tool setting Miyano BN-Series turn-mill centres to a football career in the Premier League.
Mr Birley has been entrenched in turned part machining since he left school which led him to take his skill and set up Davturn 13 years ago basing the business on his experience in cam autos. He bought his first CNC machine in 2007 which set the firm on its steady growth pattern and in the same year was joined by his son Matthew. Matthew had decided he would rather have a longer skill-based future in machining than he would as an early career footballer when he played for Premier League side Birmingham City.
Indeed, under his father’s training he progressed to become a director of Davturn having learnt very quickly to become a highly skilled programmer and machine setter. The firm also has two apprentices who, like Matthew, are being taught how to competitively apply and use technology involved in modern machining techniques.
Today some 20 active, mostly Midlands-based customers from sectors that include hydraulics and pneumatics, electrical, door-closure, fastener, construction, vehicle and rail as well as producers of control cabling. This means Davturn faces a broad brush of component types from batches of 1,000 to almost continuous production of 500,000 quantities with cycle times varying between 15 secs and 5 mins. Materials too vary from plastics to aluminium and high grade steels.
Since its installation, the BNE-51SY6 has not stopped producing components with the machine running seven days around-the-clock. During the night and weekends, machine monitoring creates a call-out and immediate return to the workshop. Said Matthew Birley: “The capability of the machine to hold so many tools on the two 12-station all-driven turrets means we can easily accommodate a suite of common tooling and rarely need to change a toolholder. As a result, resetting is generally prepared and quick, most operations take less than 40 mins which helps keep our utilisation of the machine very high.”
He then explained how he uses the latest Citizen Wizard programming aid for both Miyano machines. “This certainly enables new multi-featured parts, often involving difficult materials such as high tensile EN16T and EN24T, 303 austenitic and heat-treatable bearing Grade 404-C stainless steels to be efficiently programmed with good balance to the cycle between the two spindles.
Matthew Birley then follows on to describe one part produced in a 2,000 batch out of 25 mm EN16T bar for use in truck suspensions. “We held 0.025 mm in the bore and 0.02 mm on the outside diameter which has a 0.8 CLA surface finish without any interruptions for adjustment.” The part involved all tools being able to be used in overlapping operations between the two spindles and two turrets and as he said: “… with the power available and the inbuilt rigidity of the machine it was a very straightforward to achieve a totally balanced machining cycle between each spindle.” The part involved turning, drilling and counterboring, the rolling of an M10 internal thread, the milling of an 18 mm hexagon that were all completed in a 2 min cycle.
Davturn is often called to machine difficult materials such as EN16T, EN24T, 303 austenitic and Grade 404-C stainless steels on the Miyano B-Series turn-mill centres.
The Miyano BNE-51SY6 has been developed for single cycle machining with the ability to cut with three tools simultaneously overlapping when needed at both ends of a workpiece. This is aided with the high rigidity of the 7.8 tonne machine that features boxway slides. It has a 15 kW main and 7.5 kW secondary spindle both having maximum speeds of 5,000 revs/min. The machine has the advantage of 12-station all-driven turrets. As Davturn has found, this level of power to the driven tools of 2.2 kW delivering 25 Nm of torque and speeds of up to 6,000 revs/min has enabled cross machined features to be very effectively produced.
Having the flexibility of the new BNE has also helped win a contract involving 1,000 sub-assemblies and part production a month to produce windscreen wiper assemblies for the railway industry. Here a range of component sizes in 303 stainless steel benefitted from the easy to set balanced machining cycles involving drilling, turning, boring and threading M26x1 each end with 45 mm lengths using both spindles. “This capability was an important factor in establishing a competitive price to win and succeed in the contact,” said Mr Birley.
As Mr Birley commented: “Investing in the Miyano and with the level of support from Citizen’s application team means we are now riding a high.” He then adds details of a further contract won following the machine installation. This involves a six part series of hydraulic valve sleeves complete with spools between 16 mm and 30 mm diameter in 440-C stainless steel.
He said: “We are able to machine the largest of these in under 5 mins with the most complex having 11 grooves in the outside diameter and 50 holes pitch drilled 5 mm diameter from the grooves into the bore which has 0.05 mm tolerance. Because we are able to simultaneously combination gang drill the holes using both turrets and fully deburr in-cycle we are achieving a totally different capability that we could never have even dreamt about before.
