In 2009, almost all of Dawnlough’s (www.dawnlough.com) turnover came from the design and manufacture of special-purpose tooling for the medical-device industry. This work continues undiminished for the Galway-based sub-contractor, which has Boston Scientific, Stryker, Medtronic and Abbott among its many regular customers.

Over the past six years, however, turnover has increased five-fold, largely as a result of entering the aerospace sector, which now accounts for 50% of the firm’s business.

Managing director Brian McKeon says: “We anticipate that our aerospace work will rise to 70% of turnover by the end of 2017, which is remarkable, as it all happened unexpectedly.

“Towards the end of 2011, a Chinese sub-contractor failed to supply parts to BE Aerospace — in Ireland — for first-class and business-class aircraft seats. We were asked to rescue the situation, and we produced 2,500 components. Aerospace work grew rapidly from there.”

Dawnlough has since gained AS9100 RevC accreditation for quality management in the aircraft industry; it has also been awarded Tier One supplier status by BE Aerospace and Bombardier. Dawnlough also exhibited at the Paris Air Show for the first time in 2015.

Current aerospace contracts entail machining wing sections and fuselage parts from aluminium and stainless steel, as well as engine mountings from cobalt chrome; these go up to 1,270 x 508mm — the maximum that can be accommodated by the company’s Hurco VM30 vertical machining centre. This is one of 23 prismatic metal-cutting centres at the Galway factory from the same supplier, which has also delivered a CNC lathe with driven tooling — a TMM8, for producing components up to 256mm in diameter x 588mm long.

Mr McKeon bought his first Hurco machines (www.hurco.co.uk) in 2005, through Irish representative Michael Gannon. The sub-contractor has added new models regularly; most are three-axis VMCs, four of which are equipped with a fourth CNC axis to reduce the number of set-ups required for machining complex parts. Often, four-axis interpolative machining is needed, as there are few right angles or square edges on aircraft structural parts.

The rationale 10 years ago was to upgrade Dawnlough’s milling section and move away from G-code data input towards conversational programming for one-offs and small batches, for which the Hurco control is ideal. Mr McKeon says: “The difference was staggering. We found we could program up to six-times more quickly by manual data input at the Hurco Max control.

As we only make small quantities of parts, it translated into a 50% increase in production output, which is why we have carried on buying Hurco machines ever since.”

One of the most recent Hurco VMCs to be installed is a five-axis VMX30Ui, which was delivered in 2014. It joined another make of five-axis machine for the one-hit machining of complex components. One in particular was an aerospace part — produced in left- and right-hand variants — that ran 20hr a day for 18 months.

A recent job on the VMX30Ui involved ‘sculpting’ a claw foot for the leg of a first-class aircraft seat out of solid bronze, using a 3mm-diameter ball-nose milling cutter (running at 14,000rev/min) and 3+2-axis cycles. With its 18,000rev/min spindle, the machine is ideal for such accurate fine-detail work. Cycle times are made quicker by Ultimotion software in the latest Hurco twin-screen control, which runs WinMax version 9 software. With up to 10,000 blocks look-ahead, this delivers short cycle times and excellent surface finish.

Dawnlough also has five seats of SolidCam, which it uses to prepare more-difficult programs off-line. However, Mr McKeon says that it is often faster to program even quite complicated geometries conversationally at the control on
the shopfloor.

This is the case for 2-D work and some 3-D shapes, where advantage can be taken of the Swept Surface functionality in WinMax to create 3-D geometry automatically. The operator can input a 2-D shape as the sweeping contour and
a second 2-D path along which it is to be moved to define the solid shape.

The next step for the Galway firm will be to equip the five-axis Hurco with an Erowa Robot Compact automated pallet changer with 205 positions for multiple pallet types. In this way, 24/7 operation will be achieved.

In conclusion, Mr McKeon said: “We excel at machining often difficult and exotic materials to tolerances beyond the capability of many other manufacturers. Over the years, there have been no components on which we could not hold tolerance on any of our machines, including the Hurcos.

“We also appreciated the supplier’s co-operation at the end of 2014, when we expanded into our present 20,000ft2 climate-controlled premises. Hurco came in and decommissioned all of their machines and recommissioned them over a two-week period. It was a big task, considering the number of machines involved, but the process was completed efficiently and on time.”