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Pheonix Tooling - Hardinge Bridgeport Machining Centres and CNC Lathes

Story added 06 July 2010.

Proudly mounted on a plinth on Ray Guttridge’s office desk above the CNC machine shop of Phoenix Tooling is the complicated finished assembly of a pilot’s side stick taken from a fast-jet fighter and produced totally out of titanium parts machined from solid by his company.

Having spent almost 40 years in precision engineering, managing director of Phoenix Tooling Mr Guttridge, has seen many changes to his company and its sector of industry. In his view, the most significant were: a complete change of tack from being a manufacturer of jigs and fixtures to utilising his close tolerance machining expertise to become a subcontract machining specialist in high precision aircraft components; and secondly, the adoption of single hit machining techniques.

Said Mr Guttridge: “Both decisions were difficult at the time, but in the longer term, perfect for the business. I’m sure had we played ostrich and totally ignored what was going on around us, the company would have progressively wilted and died.”

Phoenix Tooling’s core business is the supply of components and some subassemblies to European and American military and civil aircraft companies plus certain Tier 1 suppliers to the sector. Due to the level of CNC machining expertise, this has also spun-off contracts from the medical, optical and energy related sectors which help create sales of some £2 million a year.

In building what he describes as a very loyal customer base, Mr Guttridge has also been keen to maintain a close relationship with Bridgeport’s machine tool operations in Leicester and now Hardinge Machine Tools. This dates back to when he started his original toolmaking business in 1971 with a Bridgeport turret mill and a Jones & Shipman 540 grinding machine in the back streets of nearby Rainham in Kent. His company now has seven Bridgeport VMCs, including two 5-axis machines, several two- and three-axis turret mills and has now added a Hardinge turn-mill centre.

He said: “Our business has really developed on the back of Bridgeport. As the company introduced new machining centres we were quick to gain any advantage by buying new machines which was repaid by winning new work. As a result, we progressed into more complex components, worked in more difficult materials and rose to the need to hold ever stricter size and geometric tolerances.”


Phoenix Tooling was quick to move into five-axis machining through the installation of two Bridgeport 5AX machining centres to which Mr Guttridge maintains transformed the complete thinking in the company. He said: “We could never consider producing the type of component we now have to make, largely out of solid billets, by individual operational settings. Moving to single cycle techniques has enabled us to combine sometimes eight or even 10 conventional operations into just two and, as a result, have lopped at least 50 per cent off our previous lead times in producing typical batches of between 50 and 200 parts.”

By moving into single operational techniques Phoenix Tooling has also improved its spindle utilisation, to which he adds: “If the spindle is not cutting we are not earning and by adopting this way of working it has also enabled us to accommodate ‘cost-down’ demands from our customers.”

Phoenix Tooling normally spends £250,000 to £300,000 a year on new equipment and has recently added the latest Bridgeport XR 760 vertical machining centre with fourth axis capability and a Hardinge RS-51MSY turn-mill centre with subspindle and features a Y-axis crossfeed to the turret. The turning centre again adds a single cycle capability on smaller parts and introduces the capability for hard turning and hard milling due to the high rigidity of the Hardinge collet-ready spindles, guideway systems and turret construction supported on a polymer composite bed. In addition, Mr Guttridge insists: “It also provides cost-effective high accuracy machining due to its linear scales with a resolution of 0.0001 mm in the X and Z axes.”

“Machining errors are not in our vocabulary as the type of work we produce means we are up against strict ‘zero defect’ policies employed by customers, even on chamfers,” he said, “and when a raw billet of titanium can start off between £500 and £1,000, precision has to be inbred and at the forefront of everything we do.”

Phoenix Tooling produces quite a wide range of components and over recent years has machined parts from titanium, special steels, nylon, plastic, different types of aluminium and even special grades of rubber. Batches vary from prototypes involving up to five parts to long term contracts such as the jet fighter side stick that involves a quantity of 3,000 to be supplied in batches of 20 or so over several years.

Cycle times tend to vary from 20 mins to over three hours on the VMCs that define the complexity involved on some of the components and some wire EDM operations are run unmanned day and night.

Employing 25 people within the modern 900 m2 machine shop in Gillingham, Kent – as a time served miller and jig borer, Mr Guttridge and works manager Simon Hesketh are both very strict on the need for skill to produce the type of component required and he proudly still refers to his knowledge gained from his early training as ‘the benchmark’.

He insists new work nearly always presents totally new challenges. “By working with Bridgeport for so long, and now Hardinge, means we have a good relationship for advice and we know any new machine will perform,” he said. With all the VMCs and five-axis machines being fitted with Heidenhain controls he maintains they are really dedicated to the type of work and setting skills of his workforce. The controls also provide the flexibility advantage of common programs and interface well with the Pro-Engineer, 3-D Feature CAM and Bridgeport EZ-mill off-line programming systems installed.

Discussing the fast-jet side stick, he points out the complexity of multiple blended profiles and exact geometrical tolerances of the different features in order to create the precise feel to the pilot. “Some positional tolerances are within + 0.0025 mm,” he says, then adds, “we could never produce half the parts in the assembly without four- and five-axis facilities and the skills to take advantage of the technology.”

On Mr Hesketh’s desk is an optical housing made from a solid aluminium billet where access to produce the different features and maintain the geometric relationships could again only be achieved on batch production by combining these into a single cycle on the Bridgeport 5AX following the setting up of initial machining datums.

The latest Bridgeport XR 760 installed is powered by a 21 kW, 12,000 revs/min spindle with 134 Nm of torque. It has a 30 tool magazine and rapid traverse rates are 43 m/min over the 760 mm in the X- and 610 mm in the Y-axis. The 610 mm Z-axis has a rapid traverse rate of 36 m/min with a work table of 900 mm by 600 mm, the working volume is described by Mr Guttridge as ideal for the type of part Phoenix Tooling is producing.

Meanwhile, the Hardinge RS-51MSY turn-mill centre has a turning dia of 356 mm by 638 mm in Z. The 12 station all-driven turret has + 50.8 mm to - 34.9 mm of true Y-axis crossfeed ideal for heavier milling applications.

While the machine has a 51 mm bar capacity, Phoenix Tooling did not specify a bar feed. The machine is used to work from billeted material in the 5 inch chuck to turn-mill components in a single cycle working to automatic transfer between the main and subspindle. The main spindle is 15 kW giving up to 6,000 revs/min with the subspindle having the same spindle speed is powered by a 7.5 kW drive.

Having installed and commissioned the latest two machines from Hardinge, Mr Guttridge is currently waiting for confirmation of a further fast-jet contract from the US which he says: “Will no doubt bring another set of challenges to keep us on our toes!”


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