Alliance takes delivery of plastic cutters

Dewsbury-based Techserv Cutting Systems Ltd has delivered four HS 4000 high-definition precision plasma cutters to the Aircraft Carrier Alliance — a consortium of companies established to reduce the risk and costs of aircraft carrier procurement. These machines have been installed at the Appledore (Devon) shipyard of ACA member Babcock Marine, which is building the steel bow sections of HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.

The HS 4000 plasma cutters are capable of producing high-quality cut parts from steel sheets up to 5m wide and up to 35mm thick. They are four-axis machines, with each axis powered by a Baldor AC brushless servo-motor, driven by a Baldor digital servo-drive. The servo-drives are controlled by a four-axis version of Baldor’s ESB-2 machine controller.

Techserv’s technical director, Mike Cowley, says: “We elected to use exclusively Baldor motion control products for the HS 4000, primarily because the combination works so well at providing the extremely high level of positioning accuracy that we require. In this particular case, the servo-motors are fitted with BiSS encoders, which provide completely unambiguous absolute position data whenever they are polled by the controller.”