Geo Kingsbury supplies turning centre to F1 specialist

Work on Formula One cars and road-going supercars has given an impetus to the purchase of a six-spindle CNC turning centre

Contract machining firm Salcey Precision Engineering (SPE) specialises in manufacturing Formula One (F1) engine components in batch sizes ranging from one to 100. So the purchase in December 2015 of a German-built Index six-spindle, CNC turning centre from UK agent Geo Kingsbury might seem an unusual choice. Such machines are only economical when the quantity of turn-milled parts is higher.

F1 motorsport contracts account for around three-quarters of the throughput at Salcey Precision’s facility in Hartwell, near Northampton. The remainder involves the manufacture of similar parts for road- going supercars in larger volumes, currently 12,000 parts per month.

Winning this work provided the rationale for investment in the CNC multi. According to SPE’s managing director Richard Alcock, the machine is quick to set up and program, reducing economical batch size to the low 1,000s.

He said: “It was a fourfold increase in parts demand that very much dictated the new manufacturing solution. It all started in 2011 with an order for 3,000 supercar valve shims per month and we bought a 20mm bar capacity, sliding-head CNC lathe to fulfil the contract. By last year, the quantity had risen to 12,000 per month.

“In 2012, we won further business from the same customer that added a stainless steel valve train component. It was needed in similar monthly quantities to the shim, which at the time was 3,000, so we acquired another slider, this time of 32mm capacity without guide bush, to meet the demand. It is this job, which has quadrupled to 12,000 per month, that has been transferred to the multi-spindle auto. Increase in productivity has been dramatic. Cycle time is more than 80 per cent faster, having fallen from 91 seconds on the slider to just 16.4 seconds on the multi.”

This brings the economics of investing in the Index MS40C six-spindle auto into focus. Without it, a second 32mm sliding- head lathe would have been needed and both lathes would have had to run for two shifts rather than one, raising the prospect of employing another operator.

Now that the Index multi has taken over, the very high output allows it to complete one month’s work in a week, without the need for further staff. It leaves a lot of spare capacity during the day which, together with the potential for unattended running overnight, will allow SPE to

take on a considerable amount of extra turn-milling up to the machine’s 40mm bar capacity. With feasible batch quantities now relatively low, the chance of winning such work is enhanced.

The valve train component is produced to PPAP (production part approval process) requirements from 25mm diameter, 3m-long EN24T bar. The cycle involves front-end working followed by machining on the reverse after part-off using a scara synchro spindle and a dedicated end-working tool station.

Geo Kingsbury wrote the program as part of a turnkey supply package that also included training SPE’s staff.

A tapered bore through the component needs to be machined to a particularly tight tolerance, as size, concentricity and taper as measured by a dial bore gauge must be within ± 0.05mm. It means that a positional limit 10 times better, i.e. ± 5 microns relative to other features, has to be maintained along the length of the bore. So critical is the accuracy that SPC (statistical process control) of the bore is carried out on the shop floor by measuring one sample component in every 42, while full inspection on a coordinate measuring machine is performed on one part in 84. A process capability of 1.33 or better is achieved.

A characteristic of a multi-spindle automatic is that six spindles (sometimes more) are operating within the footprint of one lathe.