When office furniture manufacturer Eurotek made the decision to upgrade its routing capability it first trialed the technology of six market leading CNC router system manufacturers. It then selected the first of a new era of CNC router systems that Bulleri unveiled at Ligna this year, but made its final decision only after extensive consultation with the Italian CNC machinery company and its UK partner, Ney. Eurotek wanted to modify and upgrade the processing performance and environmental controls in the workplace to its exacting specifications and was keen to ensure that this could be achieved.

Andy Gwennap is works director at Eurotek in Bognor Regis and was the instigator of extensive research and capability trials designed to identify a system that met his operational and environmental needs. ‘Of the CNC router systems we trialed,’ he says, ‘Bulleri was the only manufacturer prepared to re-engineer their machine to do exactly what we were asking of it.’

The large operating table machine now on the floor at Eurotek represents a significant technological step forward for the office furniture manufacturer, but it also raises the company’s reliance on the router to an extent that pretty much renders its two existing routers redundant.

The new Bulleri is processing boards measuring 3050×2050 on each of two 3160x2250mm tables, both served by two 12-tool turret heads with auto changers. The existing CNC routers in the factory would only process boards at 3000x1200mm which meant that Eurotek was obliged to rip the raw boards first in order to get them onto the router tables and then to get only one desktop panel out of a single board. The waste factor was prodigious, says Andy Gwennap – up to 80% in some cases.

Cost savings

On the new Bulleri, however, those same components can be machined two from a board and, using Alphcam Advanced software with nesting facilities, which Ney also supplies and supports, other smaller shapes, particularly rectangular ones, can also be taken from the same panel. This has reduced the throughput of 3x2m boards by 125 per week at an estimated cost saving of around £3,000.

Now that Eurotek has no need to pre-size boards, the need for a beam saw is greatly reduced because panel sizing – rip cutting or accurate sizing of components – is now almost exclusively done on the Bulleri. As well as major raw material savings, Andy Gwennap estimates that the reduction in dependence on the beam saw has probably increased the overall throughput by 30% and may ultimately eliminate the capital cost of a saw altogether, correspondingly reducing pressure on floor space.

The fact that virtually all sizing, shaping, moulding and routing is now done on a single machine, however, does rather focus the reliance of Eurotek on its new Bulleri Power system. So while Andy Gwennap and Ney’s Andy Carrier were working on the new extraction technology with Bulleri, Andy Gwennap also stipulated that each of the two working heads must have the ability to access the entire surface area of the boards on both tables.

‘We needed this for insurance,’ he says, ‘because if there was ever a head failure on one side of the machine, we couldn’t afford to have the whole of our machining capability down.

‘It was vital that both heads could access the entire surface area of either board independently on each of the work tables so that, with one head down, we would still be able to operate with reasonable efficiency. We sell our product range through around 200 office equipment and furniture outlets nationwide – you can’t keep those guys waiting, particularly when they have hard-won orders on their books and customers to whom they’ve made delivery promises.’

Positive attitude

Apparently, when Andy Gwennap raised this condition with most of the engineers whose systems Eurotek was trialing, it was not considered to be easy to provide a solution. Bulleri, he says, was the only manufacturer willing to sit down and listen to whatever Eurotek had to say on the subject of performance and adopt a positive attitude towards meeting the demands.

In addition to these nested working capabilities, of course, Eurotek’s new Bulleri Power system will also operate in conventional CNC router mode and, because of the large table sizes, boards can be processed four to view on each of the tables. With two working head and drill block combinations operating, pre-cut blanks can be processed four to view on each table in situations where large numbers of identical components are going through in batches.

Executive chairman Bob Lee, however, had a performance stipulation of his own which involved the raising of working standards and environmental conditions on the shop floor. When Eurotek was established in 1987, it was part of a major plc and was subsequently acquired by Bob Lee and Terry Kuhler as part of a management buyout in 1991. The plan was to turn the company into a world-class player.

‘I perform better in a good working environment and I believe this is true for most people,’ says Bob Lee. ‘So our goal is constantly to improve working conditions for all our staff at all levels.’

Waste extraction

But what Andy Gwennap and his team also noticed when the big table Bulleri was working at full speed – with tools turning at 24,000rpm and traversing at 18m per minute – was that it was generating a great deal of raw material waste. The high-speed working of the machine compounded the problem because, when cutting nested components, the cutters come in from the panel edge and power the waste back out of the channels for a significant distance across the shop floor.

This volume of waste was making for a poor working environment and was, at the same time, proving time-consuming in terms of cleaning down the machine (as well as the shop floor) between each of the panels processed. What Bob Lee terms ‘housework’ – vacuuming up the waste from the machine tables after the components have been removed and cleaning up around the machine itself – was taking typically five to six minutes between each machining operation which was slowing production to an unacceptable degree.

‘We told Bulleri we wanted extraction powerful enough to clean each of the work tables automatically after every machining procedure and we wanted it so designed, and powerful enough, to avoid spewing waste out onto the factory floor. And we wanted it fast – we needed to reduce a cleaning cycle of five minutes to under one minute if we were to keep the machine working to capacity and fulfil our targets.’

Once the nested components have been removed from each work table individually, extraction hoods incorporated below the working heads and extending across the width of the table, advance automatically to cover the entire working area and leave the table itself completely dust free. Original recommendations for a 30hp extraction fan were overridden in favour of a 50hp alternative and the general feeling of the operating team is that this was a shrewd move, given the very large volumes of waste being generated.

ISO 14001

Eurotek is accredited to ISO 14001 environmental standards which is not, as Bob Lee is quick to point out, a ‘hit-it-once-and-keep-the-certificate’ procedure. ‘It’s a hard standard to meet,’ he says, ‘and it doesn’t end there. We are audited twice a year to ensure that we not only achieve the standards, but that we work on an improvement curve. This is not so much a target but rather a steadily improving regime of excellence which we all now accept is crucial to good working practices.

‘This latest Bulleri Power technology is a fairly major investment for a company of our size,’ he says, ‘but when my partner and I acquired the company 10 years ago, we’d all got fed up with working for a plc whose prime objective was to meet the targets of accountants and the demands of the shareholders. You can’t be ahead of product design when manufacturing investment is never quite financially convenient.’

Setting standards

Andy Carrier and the CNC team at Ney believe that the technology advances and adaptations they have achieved together on behalf of Eurotek will ultimately set standards that others will be obliged to follow, from both productivity and environmental points of view. CNC technology is an evolving science but Andy Carrier believes that it is this kind of teamwork that is driving it forward to the benefit of the industry as a whole.