Installation of a Hurco vertical machining centre (VMC) in the toolroom at the Ross-on-Wye factory of rubber mouldings manufacturer, Wye Valley Precision Engineering, has resulted in much faster availability of mould tools compared with when the company was using a manual-tool-change CNC mill. A typical middle plate in P20 tool steel is now programmed and machined in six hours, whereas the same job used to take a week. Said machine operator, Matthew Griths, "Programming was very time-consuming using our previous machine because the control system did not accept the DXF le output from our CAD system. So after a mould was designed, I had to program every feature manually at the control and the complexity of the tools meant that there was a risk of making errors, which were subsequently

Join for free to read