Based in Kingswinford, family-owned RP Tooling has stuck with its policy of targeting industry sectors only when they are doing well. This has allowed the firm to grow quickly; it now has 33 employees and has relocated three times since being formed in 2005. The latest move, at the end of last year, trebled the size of its factory to 2,300m2.

Tool making has always been at the core of the business, although company founders Brett Mitchell and Darren Withers have set up a plastic injection moulding facility in the last couple of years. This comprises six Borche presses rated at between 60 and 320 tonnes for the low-volume, short-lead-time production of high-value components with shot weights up to 1.2kg.

Half these components are destined for the automotive industry, either as trim or under-bonnet items — many of them for prestigious vehicles such as the Range Rover Sport, Audi R8 Etron, F-Type Jaguar and Ford Ranger. The remainder are for a wide variety of applications, ranging from medical equipment to lawn mowers and boilers.

Underpinning the manufacture of the mainly aluminium moulds, which are guaranteed to be capable of producing up to 100,000 parts and are often the bridging tool between prototyping and mass production, are three-axis vertical machining centres (VMCs), which have been sourced exclusively from High Wycombe-based Hurco Europe Ltd (www.hurco.co.uk).

RP Tooling bought machines from this supplier from the outset and had installed seven VMCs by 2010. Soon after, the number of machines had increased to 12; the first five-axis model — a VMX30U — was installed in 2012. The latest machines — two VMX30Mi models — feature enhancements to machine control and connectivity, a new livery and significantly lower energy consumption.

Hurco says that customers mention easy conversational programming at its proprietary control as a defining reason for buying its machines, although RP Tooling rarely uses this capability. Mr Mitchell and Mr Withers selected Hurco machines for their rigidity, which they believed would ensure close tolerances when machining tough tool steels — along with a good surface finish to minimise hand polishing.

Staying with one make of machine and control means that any of the company’s operators can use any machining centre; it also allows work to be swapped between machines seamlessly (all the machines in the new factory are networked with CAD/CAM systems via some 10km of cabling). Another advantage of machine commonality is being able to operate each new model without a learning curve.

Sub-contract work

The other side of the firm’s business is the round-the-clock sub-contract machining of components in a variety of materials; these range from plastics, resin board and wax to aluminium, mild steel and stainless steel. For this sub-contract work, conversational programming using the WinMax software built into the Hurco controls will be used more and more, in order to take the load off RP Tooling’s CAD/CAM department.

In particular, Mr Withers highlights the Ultimotion feature in the latest Hurco control, which allows cycle times to be cut by as much as 30%. This level of performance is attributed to the patented, software-based look-ahead capability, which uses an advanced algorithm within WinMax to evaluate the component geometry and motion profile of the cutting cycle to optimise and smooth the tool-paths.

Ultimotion is also of benefit when profiling complex features, as it reduces manufacturing costs and allows more-competitive prices to be quoted. In fact, Mr Withers says the benefits of Ultimotion are so great that all of RP Tooling’s Hurco controls, even those dating back to 2005, will be upgraded this year with the latest software.

Other features that Mr Withers highlights include ‘work offset’, which is useful when running machines unattended overnight and at weekends. Productivity is maximised by fixturing multiple jobs, importing the required programs and entering additional G-codes to tell the spindle to re-datum automatically after each job has finished.

Another is the five-axis software option NC-Merge, which allows blocks of NC code generated externally to be added to conversational elements created within the control. A typical example of where this is useful is when programming a machine in WinMax to perform simple drilling and tapping cycles, then ‘stitching in’ a 3-D engraving cycle created using a CAD/CAM system.

When RP Tooling re-located to Kingswinford, it also installed a new Mitutoyo CNC co-ordinate measuring machine in the inspection department; the company also started the process of deploying Haimer heat-shrink tooling from Fenn Tool throughout the factory. It aims to complete this process by mid-2015, thereby raising the accuracy of machining and improving the quality of surface finish — especially of mould tools.

There is a six-week order book for moulds at Kingswinford, and some two dozen are being progressed through the tool-making department at any one time; and while this volume will increase as the injection moulding side of the business increases, RP Tooling’s main growth area is expected to be sub-contract machining.

This currently accounts for about 10% of turnover, but the directors hope to grow it to 40% over the next five years. There is space in the factory for about another 20 VMCs. Mr Withers says it is likely that some of the next models will be larger five-axis Hurcos to expand RP Tooling’s scope for five-sided machining and the interpolative profiling of 3-D surfaces.