For more than 30 years, Stage One Creative Services — based just outside York — has been impressing audiences with its productions, which range from the opening and closing ceremonies of global sporting events to advertising campaigns for world-wide brands. Behind these events is some clever engineering that relies on precision-machined components.
Stage One’s remit is to convert ideas into reality, working from concepts provided by designers, creative agencies and architects. Sales and marketing director Tim Leigh says: “Such are the ideas that we are presented with that sometimes — at the outset of a project — we genuinely don’t know how we are going to achieve it.
"However, with 30-plus years of innovative design and manufacturing skills plus the dedication of our 90 employees, we create something different for our clients. Our ability to ‘do difficult things’ has seen us complete some world-famous stadium shows as well as iconic advertising campaigns.”
The scale of some of these projects requires a significant amount of machining, not only for the visual elements but also for the intricate mechanisms that make them run smoothly.
Stage One’s 8,000m2 facility contains a wide variety of manufacturing technologies, including the latest in fuse deposition modelling and laser cutting, as well as a selection of CNC lathes and mills from Burlescombe-based XYZ Machine Tools
(www.xyzmachinetools.com).
“Because of the nature of the work we are doing, much of which is confidential, we like to control the supply chain from raw material through to finished product,” says Mr Leigh. “For this reason, we may buy a machine tool for a specific project and then continue to use it for general production after the project is complete.”
This was the case with one of Stage One’s XYZ TC 320 LTY multi-axis turning centres, which was used to machine over 1,000 different components that made up Thomas Heatherwick’s Cauldron for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Given the high-profile nature of the finished product, the parts had to be machined accurately. Cycle time was also important, as the specified deadline was one that simply could not be missed; the initial cycle time of 5hr was subsequently slashed dramatically to what Stage One describes as “a confident 50min on some of the complex parts”.
The XYZ TC 320 LTY features a 33kW 3,300rev/min spindle and a maximum swing of 450mm. The machine’s capability is enhanced by the inclusion of a full C axis with 0.001deg resolution, live tooling on all 12 turret positions (via a 6kW 4,500rev/min drive) and a 100mm Y axis.
This allows parts that would normally require several separate operations to be machined in a single set-up. The machine at Stage One is also fully integrated into the company’s 3-D CAD and AlphaCAM network.
Richard Moxon — Stage One’s mechanical design engineer, who oversees the machining department — emphasises the need for accurate and consistent components. “Many of the parts that we machine on the XYZ machines, such as winches and cable drums, may end up hundreds of feet in the air, so we need to know that they have been manufactured to the correct tolerances and that they will be reliable.
"With the XYZ TC 320 LTY, we are working to tight tolerances, especially on bearing diameters, but we know that once our XYZ machines are set, they don’t move on tolerance. The versatility of the TC 320 LTY also means that we can save considerable time by combining operations on parts such as winch bodies, getting them off the machine complete in one operation.”