grinding
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Grinding
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Production bottlenecks are a familiar problem - less familiar is a bottleneck
caused by development facilities, yet this is the problem which Stroud-based
Scorpion Tooling had to address.
Fighting other peoples’ fires
FOUNDED in 1990 by Chris Wands to manufacture
standard tools for the local engineering industry, 70% of
Scorpion’s turnover is in application-specific tools. These
are designed and manufactured for customers which
include many of the UK’s leading automotive OEMs and
Tier 1 manufacturers, F1, aerospace, medical
manufacturing, precision and general engineering
companies. The cutting tool, says Wands, makes a far more
significant contribution to profitability that many people
realise. Often a special tool can deliver a far better machine
performance than standard tools; for instance Scorpion
designed and manufactured a tool which replaced five
standard tools; and in another instance modified the
geometry of a standard tool slightly and using a different
coating, quadrupled the number of components machined
by the one tool.
Prior to designing a tool, customer machining processes
and tool protocols are evaluated in order to create a tool
which delivers an optimised process. This puts pressure on
both the design capability of the company as well as its
manufacturing facilities; thus Scorpion has installed its
third Schneeberger tool and cutter grinder because of the
design/manufacturing capability which it offers. Says
Chris Wands: ‘We see ourselves as fighting other people’s
fires with the combination of design with manufacturing
capability. We aim for a long-term partnership with our
suppliers and our customers so that together we can deliver
the ideal tool for a job. We try to help the customer make
the best decision, even experimenting with coatings as well
as tool geometry to obtain the optimum performance of a
tool in a specific application.
‘Key to achieving consistently exceptional tool
performance has been combining ingenious tool design
with good quality materials and versatile machine tools.
We were up to capacity on our design capability and need to
Winterthur Technology Group, the third largest manufacturer of grinding wheels in
Europe, is embarking on a programme to raise its profile within the UK industrial market.
Wheeling out the wheels
‘We feel that now is the right time to develop our presence in the UK’ says
Chris Harford, MD for Winterthur’s UK operation. ‘Industry here remains
strong and there is clear evidence that manufacturing facilities are returning
from off-shore. We offer a one-stop shop for quality abrasives, including
lapping wheels and vitrified, conventional, diamond and CBN abrasives
employing a full range of resin, vitrified, galvanic, and electro-plated bonds.
Of even greater importance to our customers, we provide a very high level of
applications engineering.’
There are four well-established companies in the portfolio: Winterthur
Schleiftechnik, Rappold Winterthur Technologie, SlipNaxos and Wendt.
Complementary one to the other, the products share a common heritage of
in-depth, advanced research and development which delivers to the
58 MWP november 2008
create more design time. The most efficient way to do this
was to utilise the powerful Schneeberger software as the
power-house of our design department because it gives
such easy programming of even complex tools.
Additionally, of course, it allows us to convert the drawing
into a tool easily.
‘The design capability of the Quinto software,
particularly the e-grind feature, gives us the ability to create
even more complex tooling and will reduce programming
time significantly. It also makes a significant difference to
the development, for instance, of extra long and high speed
tools, different helixes etc. Our experience of the machines
we already have, and through them of Schneeberger itself,
was such that installing a third machine from the company
was the safe, as well as the obvious, choice.’
Using the latest proprietary Quinto v5 software, the e-
Grind option provides a 3D visualisation of the finished
tool with impressive precision and clarity, as well as
including practical analysis options for tool dimensions and
angles, surface orientation, and the projected High-Tide
function. The dxQ option facilitates programming helical
tools with complex profiles using a simple 2-dimensional
dfx file. dxQ permits a freely programmable combination
of rake angles along the tool profile. Calculation of the
grinding path is automatic and takes into account the exact
grinding wheel form. dxQ is a development of the proven
full radius and corner radius geometries programme,
allowing corner radiuses, ball-nosed tools, high
performance tools, high spindle speeds, and materials that
are difficult to cut to be programmed automatically. Radius
correction, which can be of any magnitude at any point of
the radius, is automatic. After grinding the first tool, the
radius is measured and any deviations from the desired
radial contour can be corrected simply and quickly.
www.schneeberger.org.ch
customer grinding
processes which
furnish optimum efficiency and profitability. Proprietary software enables
detailed cost analysis of a grinding process to be undertaken quickly, easily
and unequivocally.
Group specialities are conventional ceramic and resin bonded wheels,
super abrasive wheels, diamond dressing wheels and grinding machines.
Brands include Winterthur bonded abrasives grinding wheels, Wendt
diamond and CBN grinding and dressing tools, specialist Rappold Winterthur
large-diameter cut off wheels for the steel industry, and SlipNaxos Hot-
Pressed grinding wheels for grinding steel slabs and billets.
www.winterthurtechnology.com
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