Op twee benen sta je steviger

When Bernd Hilpert, Tool Making Manager at aqua signal AG in Bremen, received the go-ahead for expanding production capacity, it seemed like he was faced with doing the impossible – as can be seen from the following general conditions that had to be met. Up to then, the primary product of the tool-making shop was cutting tools for sheet-metal parts. In the future, it was also supposed to produce moulds for lamp covers and small deep-drawing dies and injection moulds, in part as a contract manufacturer. According to its own statements, aqua signal’s objective with its services for tool, die and mould-making is to become a leading international manufacturer of maritime lighting and signalling equipment and systems and create a second leg for its business, since that provides better security. This was the reason for investing in a machining centre for five-axis simultaneous machining of moulds and dies from steel and aluminium. Everything else they need for mould-making is already available. Hilpert mentions some of the selection criteria:

‘The machining centre should be able to work quickly and very accurately and produce very good surface quality, which means it must have high dynamic stiffness.’ He first toyed with the idea of a machining centre with a rotary/tilt table: ‘Although this would have been an ideal solution for five-axis simultaneous machining of dies and moulds, we could not have utilised its full capacity.’ What could they do? HEDELIUS, a Meppen-based machine tool manufacturer. offered a solution with its ‘two machines in one’ concept. The left-hand workspace of the machining centre houses a rotary/tilt table for five-sided or five-axis simultaneous machining, while the right-hand workspace has a rigid table for conventional three-axis machining. ‘We were immediately impressed by this machine concept, because it can be integrated perfectly into our production process and its capacity can be fully utilised, despite the small proportion of simultaneous machining’, says Hilpert with evident enthusiasm.

The HEDELIUS RS 80 Magnum ‘two-in-one machine’ has been working reliably in the mould-making shop for several months now. It produces lamp components and housings. Operations such as machining reference surfaces of lamp housings are performed in the three-axis part of the machining centre, after which five-sided machining of the housings is performed in the five-axis part. Setup operations are always performed in parallel with production time. ‘This enabled us to reduce the production time for a housing from 50 minutes to 12 minutes’, as Hilpert says to give a specific example of the productivity gains achieved by using the HEDELIUS machining centre. He also has nothing but good news to report with regard to accuracy and surface quality: ‘With the machining centre, we easily achieve the required tolerances of only a few microns, and we produce very high surface qualities.’ This high production quality is especially necessary for the sealing surfaces of housings for explosion-proof lamps.