The new DN Solutions’ VTR 1216F in-situ at Bowers & JonesBilston-based
Bowers & Jones Ltd, a market-leading design and manufacturing specialist of high-precision roll tooling and equipment for steel and copper mill customers worldwide, has invested in a new DN Solutions’ VTR 1216F wide-column ram-type vertical turning lathe supplied by
Mills CNC, the exclusive distributor of DN Solutions’ and Zayer machine tools in the UK and Ireland.
The new, large-capacity, rigidly-designed and built machine was installed at the company’s modern 15,000ft
2 manufacturing facility in May 2024 and joins three, previously-acquired machines purchased from Leamington Spa-based Mills CNC over the last four years. These machines, comprising a Doosan Puma 5100B lathe, a Doosan DNM 750 II vertical machining centre with a fourth-axis unit, and a DN Solutions’ GT 3100L box guideway lathe, demonstrate that Mills CNC enjoys a preferred machine tool supplier relationship with the manufacturer.
Jane Sommerville, Bowers & Jones’ managing director, said: “We have built a strong relationship with Mills CNC — the depth and breadth of the machine tool range it supplies combined with the first-class pre- and after-sales service and support, means that when we are looking to invest in new machine tool technologies, Mills CNC is always our first port of call.”

Bowers & Jones, under new ownership since 2020 and led by Ms Sommerville and her team, is committed to continuous improvement and, as such, regularly monitors and benchmarks the performance of its manufacturing operations in order to identify and address current and future production inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
The roll-out of the company’s improvement programme, first initiated when the change of ownership occurred four years ago, has been instrumental in Bowers & Jones streamlining and strengthening its in-house machining capacity and capabilities as a route to helping it achieve real, planned and sustainable growth. The acquisition of new machine tools has been a major factor in helping the company strengthen its supply chain relationships with existing customers and secure new roll tooling business contracts with new customers.
Bowers & Jones supplies its high-performance roll tooling and equipment to steel and copper mills in the UK and customers around the world. Furthermore, the company has recently made inroads into the US steel market where it sees significant growth opportunities and, via direct sales approaches helped by a third party agent, is currently expanding its presence there.
Indeed the company’s latest VTR 1216F VTL investment was made primarily to meet the needs of a new US customer whose products include rail ‘I’ beam sections, medium bar sections and angled bar sections for use in the rail and construction sectors.
Ms Sommerville continued: “We needed a new large-capacity VTL so that we could machine large diameter straightening rings for our customer. We won the business in the autumn of 2023 and, as a consequence, ordered the new VTR 1216F from Mills last October expecting the machine to be delivered and installed in the spring of 2024 — just a few weeks before production of the rings was due to start.”
Whil that was the plan, geo-political issues in late 2023 and early 2024 affected the safety and security of transporting freight through the Suez Canal, and as a result the machine’s delivery was unexpectedly delayed.
Ms Sommerville remembered: “We had to quickly come up with a plan B. The customer’s deadlines did not slip, so we had to use our existing machines to manufacture the first batch of rings — basically ‘holding the fort’ until the VTR 1216F arrived.”

Fortunately, the delay was not that long and instead of arriving in March last year the machine was delivered in early May. To save time and minimise further disruption, the machine was delivered directly to Bowers & Jones’ facility from Felixstowe with Mills CNC performing its PDI, machine build and installation on-site — in double quick-time.
Operator training followed soon after the machine was commissioned and the VTR 1216F began cutting metal at the beginning of June.
Ms Sommerville said: “We had been looking at investing in a vertical turning lathe for some time — partly to take pressure off an older, large-capacity Berry & Binns horizontal lathe that we had acquired some years earlier, and partly to help spearhead new business growth, particularly in the US market. We approached Mills CNC and two other suppliers to discuss our requirements and, looking at the proposed investment package as a whole, which included cost, availability, machine design and configuration, operator familiarity and after-sales service and support, decided to place the order with the supplier.”
The Fanuc-controlled 50in chuck VTR 1216F is ‘a beast of a machine’ boasting a maximum turning diameter of 1,600mm and a maximum turning height of 950mm. It is also equipped with a powerful, high-torque and thermally-stable 45kW 400rev/min 20557N-m spindle, a servo-driven automatic tool changer with 12 tools, and an innovative quad tool holder with fast indexing that enables the use of four tools directly via the ram. The machine offers impressive processing speeds, improved machining flexibility, high accuracies and repeatabilities, and therefore increased productivity.
The machine supplied to Bowers & Jones also included with a working platform for quick and easy part load/unload and operator visibility, a manual four-jaw chuck, linear scales and an automatic tool setter. Straightening rings, like all roll tool types, are performance-critical components. They are also consumable items — although Bowers & Jones’ rings, rolls and equipment have performance and longevity built into them.

Rings are used in metal forming processes to enable steel stock to pass through one or more pairs of rolls, located on stands, in order to reduce the material’s thickness, making it uniform and consistent and, where required, give the ‘rolled’ material additional mechanical and application-specific properties required by the ultimate end-user.
The rings are used to process the material into bar stock, rails and structural steel beams, angle stock and channel stock, which are used across many industrial sectors including construction, rail, energy, oil and gas, and automotive.
However, because rolls operate in steel and copper mills’ harsh and demanding environments, they are subject to high wear, thermal stress and mechanical fatigue. As a consequence, they need to be monitored regularly and, to maintain their dimensional and profile quality and consistency, need to be replaced over time.
The straightening rings being machined on the VTR 1216F are made from D2 — a high carbon, high chromium, molybdenum vanadium alloy tool steel — an abrasive material that is difficult to machine. They are made from solid round bar cut to size in relatively small batches with part-cycle times being long and turning operations performed at low revs.
Roughing operations, to date, have been undertaken on the company’s Berry & Binns lathe before the rings are then sent away for heat treatment — a process carefully monitored and regulated by Bowers & Jones, and undertaken by a number of hand-picked, preferred suppliers. When the rings return, they are finish machined on the VTR 1216F to tight geometrical and dimensional tolerances and super-fine surface finishes.
The heat treatment process gives the D2 rings their compressive strength, high wear resistance, toughness and shock resistance properties — all crucially important for delivering high-performance and long life in a demanding steel mill environment.