A subcontract supplier of precision turned parts to the aerospace industry, Rugby-based Technoset is owned by Fred Moser and run by a skilled management team headed by Managing Director, Kevan Kane. The company can trace its roots back to large volume manufacture of turned parts on cam automatics going back to the 1970s.
Having moved into computer controlled turning in the mid 1980s, the company had finally disposed of all its cam auto’s by the late 1990s. They have been replaced by 13 CNC lathes. Five are fixed-head CNC turning centres for bar work up to 65 mm diameter, all of them highly specified and with sub spindle, Y-axes and driven tooling. The other eight are CNC sliding-headstock mill-turn centres, half of them supplied by Star Micronics GB, for producing parts up to 32 mm diameter. Technoset adopts a continuous improvement policy with regard to machinery purchases and is constantly upgrading to ensure that it stays up to date with the latest manufacturing technologies. The company is accredited to AS9100 aerospace quality management standard, has introduced lean manufacturing practices and adopted the use of advanced production management software. It is moving towards real-time machine monitoring and data capture to enable management to constantly monitor key performance indicators.
As part of the group growth strategy, Technoset is planning to increase its prismatic machining capability, above that currently available using the driven tools on its turning machines, to include 3-, 4- and eventually 5-axis machining centre capability. Another management principle is empowerment, training and internal promotion of staff at all levels.
Over 80 per cent of Technoset’s turnover derives from aerospace contracts. Accordingly, the company is building on its AS9100 credentials by working towards the Society of British Aircraft Company’s SC21 accreditation, a supply chain improvement programme for raising competitiveness in the aerospace and defence industries. The next challenge for Technoset will be to achieve 6 Sigma.
Much of the work that the company undertakes involves free-issue, difficult to-machine materials such as S80 and S130 stainless steels, titanium, Inconel, Monel and many others.
Some contracts require extremely tight tolerances of a few microns. One recent job put on a Star SR-10J required a component to be produced measuring 230 microns in diameter, +5 microns, -0. Mr Kane feels that they could hold even better than that, but such accuracies are difficult to measure outside a temperature-controlled environment.
Commented Mr Moser, “We are finding that aerospace customers are asking us to hold ever tighter limits, a request that we think is being driven by the need to manufacture more efficient, eco-friendly and quieter aircraft.
“We are also being asked to facilitate easier and simpler assembly of components and sub systems with other parts arriving from different sources and suppliers, which follows from the ever increasing globalisation of the supply chain.
“The volume of work coming in is increasing all the time, as more and more people want to travel by air, including those in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and emerging Eastern European nations as their prosperity grows.”
He went on to say that the combined requirement for greater component complexity, higher accuracy, smaller volumes (typically 50- to 2,000-off) and faster deliveries all point towards the need for top-end, highly capable and reliable machine tools, which Star provides. A majority of them at Rugby are fitted with high-pressure coolant delivery and swarf management to cope with the difficult materials machined and the need to keep the working area free from chips to maintain high precision cutting.
Technoset adopts a policy of replacing machines regularly to upgrade the plant list and so take advantage of the latest innovations in machine capability and speed. Mr Moser suggests that modern CNC sliding-head lathes are around 25 per cent more productive than they were a decade ago. He cited one of Star’s latest machines, an SR-10J, that shows this level of improvement over a model of similar capacity purchased in 1997 that has recently been replaced. In-cut time is broadly similar, although cutting tool advances have helped, but it is the 35 m/min rapids of the new machine that has lead to big savings in non-cutting times.
Owing to the complexity of the work and high value of the materials machined, there is little unattended running at Rugby, although advantage is taken of a ghost shift in the evenings whenever possible. A lot of use is made of in-process inspection and monitoring of parts and tools, as well as post inspection with statistical process control.
Unlike in low-wage economies where labour is cheap, subcontractors in the UK have to produce parts automatically in one hit, right first time and delivered on time in full to be competitive. This is certainly the case at Technoset, which has seen the number of people employed for second-operations drop five-fold from 15 in the late 1990s to three currently.
Mr Kane commented that they put any part under 32 mm diameter onto their sliding-head lathes, even components that are shorter than their diameter, as they can generally be produced more quickly than on a fixed-head machine. Such is the versatility of sliding-head technology and its driven tooling capability that sometimes there is little or no turning required, but a considerable amount of prismatic machining.Technoset uses sliding-head machines from different suppliers. Cost, although important, is not the main driver. It is the subcontractor's policy to buy what it considers to be the best machine available for the applications that it has in mind for any new machine, and is aware that the various manufacturers are ahead in certain categories of machine at different times. As a general comment about Star machines, however, Mr Moser believes that their strong points are capability, reliability – the subcontractor rarely has to call out a service engineer – and build quality. The latter translates into effortless, consistent, high precision machining of tough and difficult-to-machine materials.
Moreover, residual values are strong and there is a ready aftermarket when the time comes to sell a machine and replace it with a newer, even more capable and productive model.
According to Mr Moser, the future for the Techno Group, which includes sister subcontract machinists Technoturn, Hastings, is continued growth, both organically at both sites and by acquisition when suitable opportunities arise.
