CHIRON MAGNUM SHOWERS CARADON WITH ONE-HIT MANUFACTURING SAVINGS
The introduction of one-hit valve body machining on a Chiron FZ12W Magnum vertical machining centre at Caradon Mira, the UK market-leading shower manufacturing division of Caradon Plumbing Solutions, has not only generated the desired levels of throughput and accuracy, but also cleared a production bottleneck at the Cheltenham company.
Supplied by Chiron Werke UK Ltd, the Magnum complements Caradon's existing Chiron FZ12W VMC which, as production engineer Richard Higgs explains, has served the company well over the past 10 years or so.
"On its own, however, the existing 12-tool Chiron VMC couldn't cope with the increasing volumes of work," he says. "The family of valve bodies, which are brass castings, are processed in batches of 60 to 100 and require a number of operations - including a mixture of internal and external milling, drilling and tapping tasks.
"We needed a machine that could prevent the bottleneck and was flexible enough to meet our demands for one-hit machining. We consider that the more machining operations we can complete at a single set-up then the better it is in terms of both volume and accuracy."
While speed of operation also came into machine selection, so did the desire for common tooling and programming, and guaranteed service back-up.
Meeting those demands, the FZ12W Magnum is capable of milling at 250 cm3/min, drilling 36 mm diameter and M24 tapping. This is achieved through a 20-tool magazine which boasts fast tool change time - 0.9 sec with chip-to-chip achieved within 2.4 sec - coupled with spindle speeds of up to 20,000 revs/min from the 45 kW motor.
