A Weeke BST100 CNC throughfeed drilling automat is transforming production at board component supplier Alexander Cleghorn Ltd.
The investment of more than £300,000 was made to cope with growing demand from furniture manufacturers for value-added components
Shorter batches and ever-reducing order times resulted in mounting pressure on face and end drilling of panels at the Tiptree factory, Essex.
The Weeke, supplied by Homag UK, is now making it possible for the company to accept many jobs it previously would have turned down.
Keith Pittuck, managing director of Cleghorn, said: ‘On one particular test batch we reduced our operational time from over 300 hours to 40 hours. A face drilling cycle that would take over a minute on a point-to-point machine now takes us seconds.’
The speed is down to the fixed block tooling configurations, and every spindle can be selected individually. The machine’s programming allows it to optimise setting positions so movement is from the last machine position rather than returning to a start datum point.
Weeke says the setting time from the largest to the smallest board size is around 18 seconds.
The specification for Cleghorn includes a driven infeed Bargstedt conveyor for large panels or a hopper feed system for small components. It also features end drilling for dowels and an automatic dowel gluing and inserting head near the outfeed of the machine fed by left and right hopper feeds.
In the past 12 months the company has invested £1.5m in new machinery.
