First impressions

Displaying investment confidence in an arduous UK trading and manufacturing environment, Formaplex has invested in its second Gruppo Parpas machine from Matsuura Machinery in less than 12 months.

Formaplex is a young dynamic rapid manufacturing solutions group operating from a complex of modern facilities in Havant, Hampshire that works with almost all of the UK's Formula One teams. It was founded in 2001 and reports year on year growth of between 25% and 30%.

Indeed around 20% of the company's business is in motorsport. Formaplex provides a rapid turnaround engineering service providing tools or moulds for testing the aerodynamics of car components in wind tunnels. The company claims that business has been excellent in recent years with increasing volumes of automotive mould and die work returning to the UK from the Far East.

Running 24/7 the company makes good use of unmanned CNC milling technology supplying prototype components, master patterns and rapid tooling solutions to major global companies across a wide spectrum of industries including motorsport, aerospace, automotive, medical, telecommunications and industrial OEM product producers and manufacturers. 

The search is on

In 2009 Formaplex began a research process for the next stage of growth and improvement in its production processes. The team at Formaplex had a definitive specification and capability wish list from its next CNC investment – an investment that would serve existing contracts and offer significant performance growth in terms of five axes unmanned machining.

The research process led them to supplier of machine tools and production solutions, Matsuura Machinery. The Coalville-based company is the sole UK agent for Gruppo Parpas, an Italian amalgamation of three bespoke high quality machine tool brands. Those brands under the Gruppo Parpas umbrella are OMV, Famu, and indeed Parpas.
The Gruppo Parpas product range spans milling machine tools for a wide range of applications and Matsuura's sales experience with Parpas product in the UK has led to a diverse selection of Gruppo Parpas products being purchased by UK subcontractors – including Formaplex.

Matsuura UK supports all products in its portfolio from its Coalville facility offering technical support, training and spares. It can also advise customers on how to achieve optimum productivity in terms of manufacturing processes and equipment.

Formaplex identified the FAMU Active 5 machine as the ideal solution to fulfil not only its selection criteria, but also offering the essential path to new growth, increased capacity, capability and flexibility. The Active 5 is a bespoke 5-axis high speed machine with a fixed portal and a 3,050mm by 1,100mm table. Though more than able to accommodate large, heavy and unwieldy components and billets up to 5,000kg in weight the machine occupies an ergonomic 8,160mm by 2,900mm footprint. Two of the five axes are contained within the head configuration, offering movements of 380° in the C-axis and +110°/-110° in the A-axis. X, Y and Z movements are 3,000mm x 1,800mm x 850mm. Spindle speed on the Formaplex machine is 22,000rpm. 

Driven hard

Commenting on the selection criteria, operations director, Chris Carter states: “Our initial procurement demand when investing in new CNC machines is firmly based on the quality of the actual machine – we have had some poor experiences never to be repeated.

“Dave Shooter, Formaplex's managing director and I were both aware of Parpas products having previously seen them in action in Italy and we were impressed with the quality of the machines, their robustness and fitness for purpose.”

The Active 5 is predominantly engaged in cutting aluminium, mostly manufacturing injection moulds for the Moulding Division. Mr Carter continues: “We work our machines extremely hard – unmanned 24/7 – and have developed and achieved a lights out engineering approach and methodology across our whole manufacturing operation.

“We work machines 100% of their available uptime and so they have to be fit for purpose to maintain our production schedule and workloads – downtime for us is a complete disaster. We had a few minor teething problems with the Active 5 – but nothing that couldn't be sorted quickly. Back up and service is essential to us because of the nature of our business and our response times to our customers. Dave Shooter describes us as ‘engineering paramedics'.

“Our management team predicted some time ago that we would need more 5-axis capacity to handle the complex nature of the shapes and forms we produce. The Active 5 gives us all that and the capacity to grow. The surface finish achieved on the Active 5 is excellent and we have eliminated hand finishing on the vast majority of our mould and die work.”

So good we bought another

The Active 5 is situated in Formaplex's Machining Division. Ben Yule is works manager. “99% of our work is with aluminium,” he reveals. “For us we need to put up a rough sawn block and fully automate the machining process to run completely unmanned and produce the finished article. Running unmanned – reliably – gives us a market advantage. The Active 5 does it all for us – from roughing to utilising 1mm diameter ball nose for high definition finishing work.

“We successfully ran an unmanned job over the 11 day break at Christmas that truly tested the Active 5. We came in after the break and the job was pretty much finished which was confirmation that we had made the correct choice of machine and reinforced the unmanned direction we had taken as a company, adding value that we could pass on to our customers.

“It has significantly reduced our machining times. Our problem now is that every job is funnelling towards the Active 5 because of its capability and the time it can save us – hence the order for the second Active 5.

“On one specific job, with angled slides with compound angles which previously was very manual and labour intensive, we could be there for a whole shift clocking the job up. The Active 5 utilising the full 5-axis capability completes the job in one hour 15 minutes.”

The Active 5 has revolutionised most of our processes,” he concludes. “Unmanned processing is the way forward for us as a business – we will only run a skeletal nightshift and now do not have to consider expanding this as the market improves.”

The second Active 5 machine will be installed at Formaplex in early August 2010.

Matsuura
www.matsuura.co.uk Formaplex
www.formaplex.com