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Opening New Doors in Productivity Flexible Arrow VMC does double duty - R&D and production work - for leading UK maker of hydraulic door closures and controls
Company Profile: NT Door Controls Ltd.
Location: Walsall, England
Established: 1750 (as William Newmans)
Market Area: Global
Number of Employees: 2470
Facility Size: 47,000 ft (4368 m)
Products: Door closers, floor springs, exit hardware and fire door controls
Managing Director: David Dawson
WALSALL, UK – An Arrow 500 Vertical CNC Machining Center (VMC) opened up new possibilities for the UK’s leading maker of hydraulic door systems. West Midlands-based NT Door Controls Ltd. gets double-duty benefit from the flexible VMC – higher productivity and precision at both R&D and production work. Part of the Ingersoll-Rand group, NT Door Controls produces hydraulic door closures, controls and emergency exit devices for a global customer base.
Located in the company’s design and development department, the Arrow’s precision – ±0.00016" (±4 microns) on positioning and ±0.00004" (±1 micron) on repeatability – improved the accuracy of its 3D prototypes, says chief design engineer Nick Luckett.
The prototype work demands a machine capable of doing a wide scope of machining operations on materials ranging from wood to steel with high precision, he stresses. A prototype can require machine boring, thread milling of pressurized end plugs, deep hole gallery drilling and gun drilling, as well as contour machining of cam profiles.
Through-spindle coolant, an option on Milacron VMCs, allows NT Door Controls to carry out fine boring operations up to 1.45" diameter by 10.63" deep (37 x 270 mm) with very accurate tolerances of ±0.0004" (±10 microns) on the diameter and circularity within ±0.0002" (±5 microns). Productive as well as precise, the Arrow typically takes only five minutes to bore a hole, he notes.
"We tried several other machines – both lathes and VMCs – but none met our tolerances or performed the full range of operations required by the department," says Luckett. "The Arrow 500 was the only choice – the only machine to meet our requirements for consistent accuracy and flexibility. Plus, it was miles ahead of the competition in terms of the price and specification."
The PC-based A2100 CNC makes the Arrow VMC very user-friendly with touch-screen controls, Windows NT information displays, and step-by-step user prompts, he notes. Operators got up to speed quickly, despite carrying out the complex parametric programs for prototype parts.
NT Door Controls also uses the Arrow for production machining of cam profiles. The machine maintains high productivity in the high flex role with 787 ipm (20 m/min) maximum traverse and feedrate in all axes, and 7.5 second metal-to-metal automatic toolchange time. The rapid part processing allows efficient handling of production orders for as few as ten components per batch.