The recent THINK: Production 2014 Open House event — co-hosted by Coalville-based Tornos UK Ltd (www.tornos.com) and Matsuura — proved a resounding success for the Swiss manufacturer of sliding-head lathes. The three-day event attracted over 200 visitors, and one of the highlights was the sale of a second ST26 turning centre to Hullmatic.

This Essex-based company, with a shop full of CNC sliding-head lathes from Tornos and CNC lathes from Mazak, supplies high-volume components to customers such as Caterpillar, Perkins and Delphi. Its first ST26 — installed in September as a direct replacement for an ageing Deco 20 machine — made an immediate impact, handling long production runs while offering improved flexibility and reduced change-over times.

John McBride, Tornos UK’s head of subsidiary, says: “The innovative tooling configuration on the ST26 enables Hullmatic to leave many fixed and live tooling stations set up for a variety of jobs, drastically cutting job change-over times. The guidebush/bushless system can be changed over in 15min, compared to more than 2hr on some sliding-head machines.”

Visitors to the Open House were able to see the new CT20 and GT26 turning centres, fresh from their premiere at AMB, while the SwissNano turning centre was given its UK debut. Alongside these innovations was the Almac CU3007 machining centre with a five-axis Lehmann table.

One ‘crowd pleaser’ was the Tornos TISIS machine-monitoring software, which was linked to the CT20 and GT26 turning centres. Complementary products — ranging from cutting tools and work-holding to software and surface treatment equipment — were demonstrated by partners that included Edgecam, Floyd Automatic, Baty and Iscar.