Dundee-based
Quest Precision Engineering Ltd, which serves a wide variety of customers in the oil and gas, electronics, automotive, and aerospace industries, says its continuous growth that has been assisted by the acquisition of seven high-end Nakamura-Tome turning centres from
RAM Engineering & Tooling, the Scottish distribution partner of the Wellesbourne-based
Engineering Technology Group (ETG).
Quest acquired two Nakamura-Tome turning centres during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it has been adding more ever since; it now has four Nakamura-Tome WT150II turning centres, two NTY3-150 turn/mill centres, with the latest purchase being a Nakamura MX-100.
Before the company installed its first Nakamura-Tome WT150II, it was manufacturing the autonomous valves for the oil and gas industry on six machine tools. Machining the complex 2in-diameter Inconel 718 valves, which control the flow of oil from wells, was time-consuming and not sufficiently cost-effective to compete with an existing Chinese supplier.
Gordon Deuchars, Quest’s managing director, said: “For us to win more business, we had to increase throughput and reduce costs to be cost-competitive. Ross Milne from RAM Engineering and Tooling discussed the merits of a Nakamura turnkey solution and our decision was made. We subsequently reduced the cycle times by around 300% — and repeatability was first-class.
“The first Nakamura led to a second in just three months and then around 18 months later we won a big order that resulted in us buying a third and then a fourth. More recently, we needed to machine the very complex ‘Mark 3’ valve from Inconel 718 and needed a very robust machine to take us to that next level — hence the NTY3-150s. We have now progressed to the Mark 4 valve and for this, we just installed the new MX-100 multi-axis machine. This has a swivelling B-axis, opposing spindles, and a lower turret. It also has a gantry loader and bar feeder on the machine and gives us a proper step-change in capability.”
Discussing why Quest needed the MX-100 machine to produce the Mark 4 valve in just one hit, Quest’s cell leader Craig McDonald said: “If we try to do this job on some of our other Nakamura’s, we would have needed to buy an angled head to machine a 32deg hole. With the MX-100, we have the swinging B axis that can do that. We have included the gantry loader, so we can fully automate the process with the parts being loaded via the bar feed and after machining, the gantry loader will collect the parts and move them to the conveyor at the end.”