Founded in 1977 as a family-run business and working from a small unit near Blackpool town centre,
Beechwood Engineering Ltd is now a 23-employee ISO: 9001 certified manufacturer located in Poulton-le-Fylde; it is managed by the third generation of the family, and predominantly a five-axis machine shop with ambitions to implement automation throughout the shopfloor. Despite manufacturing from simple to complex five-axis parts for the F1, nuclear, offshore, and food industries, the company recently needed a three-axis vertical machining centre (VMC).
Stewart Churchill, Beechwood Engineering’s managing director, said: “We produce everything from one-offs to batch runs in the thousands, machining materials from plastics to exotics; and while most of our machining is complex five-axis work, we do machine quite a lot of jigs and fixtures, as well as parts that do not warrant five-axis machining. For this we wanted a new three-axis machine to replace an older one.
With Heidenhain CNC systems standardised on its machining centres throughout the machine shop, Beechwood wanted a three-axis VMC with this make of control. The machine also needed to fit into the floor area of the ageing outgoing VMC machine and be available on a quick delivery; and as the company had previously bought machines from the
Engineering Technology Group (ETG), Wellesbourne — including a Quaser MV204CPL machining centre bought back in 2012.
Mr Churchill said: “While that machine has since been moved on, we were very impressed with its performance and reliability, so when it came to buying a new three-axis VMC we didn’t look any further than ETG and bought a Quaser MV184EH. The key drivers in installing the new Quaser were an updated and more productive platform for programming, setting up jobs, and holding tight tolerances. Since being installed, it has been running day shifts and night shifts, machining parts such as complex jigs and fixtures, as well as valves, plates and other more simple parts for the oil and gas industry — and alleviating capacity from our five-axis machines.”
As standard, the Quaser MV184 has a 1,200 x 600mm bed, a work envelope of 1,020 x 610 x 610mm, BT40 spindle options from 9,000 to 24,000rev/min, and a comprehensive range of options.