Manufacturing Machinery World April 2024

CASE STUDY
FABRICATOR REBALANCES BUSINESS TOWARDS
SUBCONTRACT MACHINING
Twenty years ago, Gareth Davies started
Burton-on-Trent company TAS Engineering
as a steel, stainless steel and aluminium
fabrication shop serving food and beverage
customers, the pharmaceutical and
automotive sectors, and industry in general
with fire escapes, factory staircases and
secondary steelwork.
In 2014, he established a machine shop to
add extra value to the products the company
was shaping and welding. Today, there is a
pair of 3-axis, vertical-spindle machining
centres on-site and three CNC lathes, the
latest of which is a second-hand Cincom L20
sliding-head turning centre from Citizen
Machinery UK.
What prompted the purchase in October
2023 of this 20-year-old lathe, the company's
first sliding-head model, was a desire to turn
more efficiently components in a range of
materials from bar up to 20 mm in diameter.
A case in point is the ongoing production
since 2020 of a 16 mm diameter, 316 stainless
steel magnet holder, which is welded to a
small, laser-cut and bent plate to form part of
a safety unit for industrial switchgear. The
turned component, of which 200 are required
per month, was previously produced
complete on one of two fixed-head, twinspindle
lathes (that have since been sold) in a
2.5-minute cycle.
Mr Davies had previous experience of
programming and setting sliding-head
lathes, albeit from 40 years ago working for a
subcontracting firm in London that
happened to be the first ever customer of the
The 20-year-old control system looks surprisingly modern.
Gareth Davies, owner of TAS Engineering, operating the used Citizen Cincom L20 slidinghead
lathe on the shop floor in Burton-on-Trent. The machine was supplied with an Iemca
bar feeder and a CoolBlaster high pressure coolant delivery system rated at 2,000 psi.
Citizen sales agency at that time. The lathes
were equipped with servo-driven cams and
while the technology has moved on
enormously over the decades, the underlying
principle of operation is still similar.
It was apparent that the steel magnet
holder could be produced more quickly on a
modern Citizen L20 twin-spindle, slidinghead
turning centre than on a fixed-head
lathe due to the faster axis motions of the
gang tool carriers on the former compared
with the turret movements on the latter.
However, Mr Davies was surprised to find
that the part could be machined more than
three times faster on the Cincom, the cycle
now taking just 48 seconds.
The sliding-head turning centre was
installed and commissioned in October 2023,
so it is still early days. Nevertheless, four
additional jobs had been won by the end of
the following January as a result of having
the capacity available on the shop floor.
None of this new work has anything to do
with the fabrication side of the TAS
Engineering's business. One contract
involved the production of 1,000-off brass
parts for a customer in industrial gases,
which ran 24/7 for one week, despite Mr
Davies being new to sliding-head lathe
operation.
The other jobs were 70-off engine parts
produced from steel bar in one hit rather than
in two operations on a fixed-head lathe plus
another on a mill; 3,000-off heritage railway
carriage brass fixing pins; and another
component for the industrial gases sector
machined from 0.75-inch diameter CZ121.
50 Manufacturing Machinery World, April 2024