Speed is everything

With a plant list now extending to over 175 machine tools, its most recent development into advanced manufacture has realised new opportunities and raised the standard of its work. In the subcontract machining market, things have rarely been tighter and with competition for business being relatively fierce, those that can offer more for less are reaping the opportunities available. Turnaround seems to be one of the deciding factors as far as the company is concerned. Director Cory Hopwood explains further: “One reason we stand out from the competition is by being able to quote jobs accurately within an hour. A lot of our customers have their own supply chains to satisfy and so being able to turn work around quickly is helpful.” He continues: “I believe we win a significant amount of business this way, especially as we do a lot of work in the breakdown industry where a customer might be losing money by the hour because of broken machinery. Another reason is that we have CNC machines complementing our manual tools in all departments, be it in turning, grinding, gear cutting, milling or wire erosion which enables us to be really flexible.” As an evolution of this principle, Hopkinson & Hopwood's continual investment in the latest machinery has seen it diversify into advanced manufacturing over the last few years in the form of an AgieCharmilles Robofil 440cc wire erosion centre, purchased several years ago, and more recently, a Studer S151 grinder, both capable of sub-micron accuracies. Both machines are contained within a 20°C temperature controlled and air conditioned clean room at the company's 20,000ft² facility to ensure that there are no discrepancies when it comes to inspection, and both are running 24 hours a day with the exception of set-up time. Though the machines represent a substantial investment – the Studer costing around £300,000 – the results speak for themselves. “We have always ground large parts but this is our first CNC machine for large internal and external grinding,” adds Mr Hopwood. “Manual grinding can be time consuming and labour intensive and we were experiencing a demand for large parts that the conventional machines couldn't deal with. The manual cycle time for one particular part was originally eight hours, but the Studer cut this down to 45 minutes.” As for accuracy, the Studer machine utilises CBN grinding to work to within a micron in a bore and has one micron repeatability over hundreds of products. As has become a common trend throughout UK manufacturing, specialist, high precision work is where Hopkinson & Hopwood has been able to establish a successful niche, backed by its experience and ability to offer data and advice to customers, such as on specialist modifications for jet engines for example. “We produce a number of gears for prototyping in the aerospace industry,” continues Mr Hopwood, “and they have very specific modules and diametrical pitches because they need exacting gear trains. Our high accuracy machines can manufacture those quite easily now but before that, we had to just turn that sort of work away. Now we do subcontract work for other companies that don't have this capability. Additionally, with these machines you can be sure to get a component exactly to the specified design first time, which is really paying off. We carry out all our aerospace gear cutting in the clean room now, otherwise it's just not going to be correct. No other method of manufacture would get the same results.” And this level of precision is necessary with the level of competition in the UK market. “We find that these days all our customers want parts to be perfect to the drawing within micron tolerances and in turn we expect everything that we buy to be perfect,” Mr Hopwood concludes. “Everyone at our level in the industry now has CMM and dedicated CNC gear inspection equipment so there's no room for error.” Hopkinson & Hopwood
www.hopkinsonandhopwood.co.uk