Tiermac
One hour set times are just a fading memory for precision machinists, Tiermac Engineering
Each machine can now be reset in under 10 minutes and pallets are interchangeable between each of the 3 machines. "You don’t realise how long it takes to set up jigs and fixtures with no precise location on the machine" commented Sean, "we now have the flexibility to do very small batches and take jobs we would have rejected before". He continued "we can even set an indexer with trunion and tailstock in minutes and know it’s precise position without clocking-up".
Tiermac Engineering Ltd, Ennis, Ireland, is a subcontract machine shop specialising in castings for the servo motor industry. With a wide variety of castings, a typical batch size of 150 and 20% of the work involving prototype runs of 5, the 3 new Bridgeport vertical milling centres need multiple fixture changes per day. This reduced the machine utilisation to about 60% with set times of 1 hour repeated up to 4 times per day – there had to be a way of improving machine efficiency.
Managing Director, Sean Scanlon, decided to visit the Mach 2002 exhibition to find a solution.
Oct 2002
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