With such a longstanding pedigree, it’s no surprise that Meltham has amassed a sizeable, loyal customer base over the years. Its clients operate across a broad span of industries – from Formula One and aerospace through to toolmaking, medical, fasteners and cutting tools.
Meltham's capacity is equally as wide ranging, encompassing centreless grinding, surface grinding and cylindrical grinding with the capability of producing parts in a wide variety of materials including steel, carbide and ceramic.
Whilst the largest market for Meltham is the UK, the company also successfully exports its products further afield to overseas customers in Taiwan, Egypt, Germany and Italy.
Eric Charlesworth had been aware of Rollomatic tool grinding machines for some time and had identified a need for grinding parts to a higher precision with reduced cycle times. In particular, he wanted to negate the need to transfer parts across several different machines to arrive at the finished result.
“I was looking for a machine capable of producing parts to the highest precision in a single automatic operation – including an ability to produce large batches of parts and to run all night unmanned – whilst equally producing special tools in small batches during the day,” he explains.
“As the purchase of the machine would be the largest single investment ever made by the company, we certainly did our homework,” he adds. “Investigations and evaluations were carried out over several months and also included a visit to MACH 2018. While we were there, my colleague Peter Nash and I visited the Advanced Grinding Solutions stand and saw the Rollomatic Shapesmart NP3+ grinding machine which appeared to tick all the right boxes.”
This allows parts with large length to diameter ratios to be machined. In fact component part lengths of up to 400 times the part diameter can be ground without deflection issues to accuracies of less than 0.002mm on large batches.
However, purchasing decisions of this magnitude shouldn’t be rushed so after seeing the Rollomatic machine at MACH, Meltham sensibly investigated possible alternatives in the marketplace before making a final decision. Following an extensive review, the Rollomatic remained top of the shortlist and was purchased in January this year.
Eric Charlesworth explains the reasons behind his decision: “The Rollomatic Shapesmart grinder is the only proven solution available that gives us the flexibility, degree of high precision and mirror like surface finishes that we need to produce components in one automatic operation,” he affirms.
“Whilst other machines are available, in general they don’t offer the ability to both rough and finish grind in a single operation – and in the case of the Rollomatic both at the same time if desired. As a complete package, we simply couldn’t find a better alternative.”
Mr Charlesworth further quantifies how the Rollomatic machine has improved production efficiency at Meltham Carbide citing an example involving the manufacture of a set of ten carbide punches 6.35mm diameter by 110mm long with a point, radius and three different diameters with 5µm tolerances.
“This would have taken us a full day to manufacture previously but now on the Rollomatic we have just 15 minutes to set-up and around two hours grinding time. The surface finish is also much better and the lengths and diameters are all well within tolerance.”
Meltham Carbide decided to send engineers to Rollomatic's headquarters in Switzerland for operator training. All were impressed not only by the company’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, but also by the training provided which was described as ‘full-on but helpful and informative’.
The software, in conjunction with the rough and finish grinding wheels set-up allows users to specify multi-pass grinding operations for roughing and/or finishing to achieve the highest possible level of accuracy whilst creating excellent surface finishes on tapers and radii. Even the longest of tools are produced with a concentricity runout of less than 0.001mm.
Renishaw and Marposs gauges are used for part positioning and for the post-process automatic gauging of ground diameters with automatic feedback to the Rollomatic machine’s Fanuc control.
This ability to automatically gauge parts on loading and again after grinding was important to Meltham when it introduced unmanned overnight production to its operations. Gauging means that any deviations in geometric and dimensional output are detected and if necessary, the machine can be stopped before defective parts are produced.
“The ability to run lights out is certainly one of the best aspects of the Rollomatic machine,” Mr Charlesworth enthuses. “We can now set-up a job and leave it running during the night or even over the entire weekend using the robot loader and Marposs auto-measuring system.”
As with all Rollomatic grinding machines, the NP3+ comes with a three year parts and labour warranty and lifetime software updates as standard. “This is something not offered by other suppliers and it provides real peace of mind,” Mr Charlesworth says. “Another plus point is Rollomatic’s excellent aftersales support and UK-based service team which has been instrumental in us getting the best out of the machine.”
For Mr Charlesworth, there’s no doubt that the NP3+ has transformed production at Meltham Carbide Precision. Previously, punches were manufactured using three separate machines which constantly needed resetting to achieve the specified levels of parallelism, roundness and dimensional tolerances. With the Rollomatic, a single automatic set-up is all that’s required.
“Meltham is precisely the type of new customer that AGS looks for to add to Rollomatic’s already impressive UK and Irish customer base,” he asserts. “With more rotary tools of all kinds being manufactured on Rollomatics here in the UK and in Ireland than on any other make of grinding machine, they are of course one a leader in their field.
“In the past year, we have been able to add a number of new customers that have become Rollomatic end users for the first time and this is especially pleasing. The NP3 and NP5 machines (newly designated as NP50) are the firm favourite for tool manufacturing companies and it's good to see other forms of specialist makers of tools and punches investing in these machines to increase the precision of their parts and significantly reduce cycle times.”
Advanced Grinding Solutions www.advancedgrindingsolutions.com
