Business partners Neil France and Ian Simpson set up Altaras International in a 10,000 sq.ft. unit in Worcester in May 2012 with two machining centres and a co-ordinate measuring machine; one year later, they won a long-term contact for an alloy-steel defence part that would have tied up both machines full time.
Mr France says: “We would not have been able to produce anything else, so we needed two more machining centres quickly. Replication of our existing plant — a three-axis and a five-axis machining centre — was needed, but rather than go to our original supplier, we decided on a DMC 1035 V ecoline three-axis machine and a DMU 50 ecoline five-axis model from DMG Mori.”
The rationale was to gain high-accuracy machining on equipment that was less costly. The defence part required three-axis interpolative plus two-axis positional finishing, for which the competitively priced DMU50 ecoline
(www.dmgmoriseiki.com) was suitable, whereas a full five-axis machining centre would have been unnecessarily expensive.
Likewise, the DMC 1035 V ecoline was an economical solution for the three-axis roughing cycles. The total machining time per part is about 6hr.
Mr Simpson says: “We knew from previous employment about the quality of DMG Mori machines. One of the big advantages is that there is a vast range to choose from, so you can get a machine that exactly matches your needs and budget, without having to pay over the odds for a model that is too high-spec.
The machines were delivered quickly, so we could keep the new OEM happy — as well as our existing customers.”