“There’s a natural synergy there,” he adds. “We can testify the quality and precision of the machines we sell because we use them ourselves. It’s the same story with bandsaw blades. We believe that places us in a unique position in the marketplace.”
But there’s always a conundrum with companies that sell machines and a service – and that’s the constant possibility that a subcontract customer will at some point decide to buy his or her own machine and take the work in-house. At best, the supplier gets a machine tool sale out of the bargain – but that’s not guaranteed – and at worst it comes away with nothing.
“There’s always that risk,” Mr Fleeming agrees, “but if a customer has made an informed business decision to invest in a saw for economic or logistical reasons then we have to respect that. We often do get the business on the subsequent machine sale, but not always. When we do, we usually pick up servicing contracts and sales on consumables.
“On occasions we’ve helped customers set-up their own sawing cells; and for a small number of clients, we have our own employees permanently installed at customer sites. We try to be flexible to accommodate our customers’ needs.”
This is evidenced by an installation at a well-known aerospace customer located in the North of England manufacturing large volumes of titanium components and assemblies for commercial aerospace applications. There are 32 Accurate Cutting Services employees working permanently onsite looking after a production cell comprising 18 Amanda saws and three milling machines which are used for a pre-sawing process.
The parts being cut are far from standard either. These include large, complex cross-sections that need to be cut consistently and to tight tolerances. In fact, the Amada vertical bandsaws supplied by Accurate needed to be modified – height, guides, tables and coolant system – to meet the customer’s requirements.
There are two sites in the UK. The main headquarters is located in Redditch which occupies 19,500ft² across three bays and has a 25 tonne lifting capacity. This facility looks after all general subcontracting and any development work for bespoke customers applications. Some smaller sawing machines are sold from stock here; larger variants are built to specification and supplied directly from the manufacturer.
Speaking of which, Accurate has established very close working relationships with its two main principals Amada and Soitaab/Friggi. Machine specification and build is very much a three way collaboration between the customer, Accurate Cutting Services and the manufacturer. Indeed final machine sign-off often takes place at the manufacturer’s premises.
A smaller, northern office is located in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire which takes care of bandsaw blade welding and sales, plus spares for Amada machines and the manufacture of a range of abrasive cut-off machines for extremely hard materials that can’t be cut via traditional sawing methods.
“Sometimes the figures just don’t warrant the expenditure,” Mr Fleeming explains. “There’s little point spending £30 - 40,000 (or more) on a bandsaw when you just need £1,000 worth of material cutting carried out in short runs.
“Although the customer picks up the transportation tab on top of that, for some clients it’s far more cost-effective to sub the work out to us. An additional benefit is that they don’t have to worry about the cost of saw blades and machine servicing, or more fundamentally, they may not have the space for a bandsaw of their own.”
With more than 26,000 customers on its database of which up to 4,000 are active in a given year and 300-400 provide regular repeat business, the subcontract work can be pretty varied, sometimes calling for skillsets over and above the norm. For example Mr Fleeming recalls one particular ongoing job for a foundry that involved cutting off headers, runners and risers on castings weighing a colossal 22 tonnes.
Sectioning of castings for development work is also undertaken from time to time – as is reclamation work on parts that perhaps have been problematic during manufacturing and the customer needs to investigate internal structures and dimensions.
Additionally, reclamation and recovery of materials and parts from castings, machined components or failed parts is achieved, recovering or repurposing structures for reuse, or recycling, saving customers time and money.
In terms of the size of work Accurate Cutting Services can process, again things are pretty flexible: “Imagine a 2m x 2m x 6m envelope; we can process any material, in any configuration that dimensionally fits within that envelope,” Mr Fleeming affirms.
In 2014, Accurate acquired Birkett Cutmaster and with it took ownership of the exclusive UK distribution deal Birkett had with leading machine tool manufacturer Amada. In many ways this was ‘business as usual’ because Accurate had been selling Amada equipment for years – albeit through Birkett. Now it could deal directly with the manufacturer.
With its own UK site in Kidderminster, Amada is arguably best known for its ranges of fabrication equipment – bending and punching machines, laser profilers, shearing equipment, welders and automation solutions – but that’s only part of the story because it also specialises in the manufacture of sawing machines, grinding machines and double headed horizontal and vertical milling machines (THV series).
Accurate Cutting Services represents Amada in all three of these disciplines but not surprisingly, sawing is where the true synergy lies.
“The Amada range includes circular saws and bandsaws (horizontal and vertical) in a variety of configurations – automatic, semi-automatic, manual and pulse,” Mr Fleeming explains. “These can be supplied as standalone units or with automation options such as robotic loaders/unloaders.”
Soitaab/Friggi is another important agency for Accurate Cutting Services. Smaller machines include pull-down variants, semi-automatics, automatics and mitre cutters, but for large, demanding work, Soitaab gantry saws are the way to go and things can get pretty big. The largest saw Soitaab manufactures has a positively gargantuan 4m x 4m x 12m envelope.
Because of their size and the fact they tend to be application-specific, the larger saws in the Soitaab range are usually built to order and can be modified to suit application specifics.
A third manufacturer worthy of mention is also an Italian company – Pedrazzoli, a manufacturer of predominantly high accurate, robust manual, semi-automatic and automatic circular saws. Pedrazzoli has been supplying saws to the UK market for 40 years with some 40,000 machines sold.
“The issue currently with Pedrazzoli is that the original company no longer exists,” Mr Fleeming affirms. “A new owner stepped in but things didn’t work out so we’re now waiting on developments from another company that’s keen to take on the range.
“I’m pretty optimistic about the future of Pedrazzoli,” he enthuses. “They’re excellent machines and very well-respected in the marketplace. We need a strong supplier of circular saws in our portfolio and whatever happens we’ll make sure we’re covered. We have one or two options moving forward.”
“For bandsaws, Amada supply excellent blades for their machines and for circular saws our supplier of choice is Italian manufacturer Julia,” Mr Fleeming says. “These are highly rigid, high precision blades available in carbide or HSS variants. They’re not the cheapest but you really do get what you pay for here in terms of performance and durability. Julia also offers unique formulations for blade body coatings to tackle the most demanding sawing tasks.”
Bandsaw blades are supplied in strip form from the manufacturer. Subsequently they’re de-coiled, cut to length and welded. Circular saw blades are received as disc blanks. The teeth are then cut at Redditch on fully automated robotic grinders to the required pitch.
Accurate Cutting Services www.accurate-cutting.co.uk