Editor's comment for January 2023: From the big to the very small

It’s always a great pleasure to visit a machine tool builder’s manufacturing facility to see how these industrial workhorses are made and the tangible prospect of being introduced to the machines, and more importantly the people building them.

Visiting Nicolás Correa’s plant in a rainy Spain (yes it does rain there and not just on the plain) was particularly fascinating because it builds what can only be described as some of the industry’s biggest machine tool monsters.

Huge gantry and moving column machines tower over you as you walk from one manufacturing process area to another. Massive crane systems transport hulking hunks of metal around the facility. You can’t fail to be at least slightly wide-eyed.

Indeed, watching Correa’s own technology roughing the machine beds and guideways along basketball court lengths with chips flying is a particularly striking sight, even if you have seen it many times before on a lesser scale.

The contradictory thing about observing all this mammoth metalworking expertise is that it’s all for the purpose of producing technology that removes metal from large parts to micron accuracies – producing components to tolerances many times smaller than the width of a human hair.  

Most of this accuracy is thanks to Correa’s renowned machining heads which it understandably takes great pride in. Looking at the internal schematics of these mechanical devices pinned on the workshop wall is akin to seeing the intricacies of a Rolex watch movement, except on something the scale of an oversized pumpkin.

In an age when we are so familiar with the constant praise and plaudits for digitalisation in manufacturing it’s nice to see a company so resolutely sticking to hand-built mechanical principles. A great example of the genuine reliability of Newtonian physics and the laws of motion if ever you needed it.

Building such bespoke but flexible machines means the Touch Time (that Lean manufacturing term I personally hate, devaluing as it does the years of skill and know-how it takes human beings to acquire so they can build and assemble complex and intricate machines) can be lengthy, but if you want such accurate, dependable and ultimately profitable technology in your machining armoury it’s worth the wait.

To me it’s no surprise that such a principled approach – all part of the company’s heritage and years of constant improvement – have led to it being the manufacturing and exporting success that it is today.

It’s an example of how businesses using traditional manufacturing methods – providing they’re integrated with modern production technologies – are really hard to beat.