Founded in 2010 and located near Nottingham City centre, Doosan Precision Engineering (the company name is a culmination of the directors family names) specialises in CNC turning and milling, producing parts for a wide variety of industries ranging from motor-sport to food.
The small business has grown rapidly by investing in a diverse range of machine tools with multi-axis capabilities to produce parts in one hit.
Although no relation to the Doosan machine tool brand, the ISO: 9001-certified company has invested heavily in Doosan machines from Mills CNC and has a plant list that includes a DNM 500 machining centre with a fourth axis, plus five turning centres that comprise a Lynx 300M, a Lynx 220LM, two Lynx 220 LSYCs and a nine-axis MX2100ST — the newest arrival.
As a machine shop primarily conducting turning activities, Doosan Precision Engineering is not the type of facility where one would expect to find HyperMill five-axis CAM software from Bicester-based
Open Mind Technologies UK Ltd.
David Booth, from Doosan Precision Engineering, said: “We were spending a long time setting up some quite difficult parts with some very intricate set-ups to cater for difficult-to-machine features that we are machining, which is why we looked at HyperMill.
Prolonged set-up times were increasing our costs and we were losing work, some to overseas. Since installing HyperMill we have managed to win this business back.
“This software has reduced set-up times massively. Some parts were taking 4-5hr to program and set; the new CAM system has reduced this to as little as 30min in many cases. While Open Mind is well respected for its five-axis milling technology, we bought the software for our turning requirements.
“We have one part that was originally manufactured using grooving tools to machine a scallop at the back as well as other features. Unfortunately, the challenging material results in poor swarf control, but with HyperMill we can use a single button tool and get the job off the machine completely finished.
“The decision to use this single-tool configuration was decided by the CAM software, which selected the best strategy to control swarf and reduce the cycle time, which was cut massively.”