Advanced Grinding Solutions

Coventry based Advanced Grinding Solutions (AGS) has announced the sale of several additional grinding machines and Comat filtration systems to Smithstown Light Engineering (SLE) in Ireland. When installed this will mean that AGS will have supplied Smithstown with some £3.75m worth of grinding machines since they started work with them in 2021.

The latest grinding cell comprises of an additional Tschudin centerless grinding machine and a 6-axis Rollomatic grinding machine for grinding specialist medical parts along with a large Comat filtration system.

Smithstown, whose customers include DePuy, Zimmer Biomet, Stryker and Boston Scientific, to name but a few, have grown rapidly in recent years as the larger OEM medical manufacturing companies have sought to use specialist outside providers for higher value machining processes including grinding and surface finishing which is exactly the fields that AGS specialise in providing machine tool solutions to. Today Smithstown offers its medical customers a true one-stop shop for all kinds of medical component manufacture and has mastered a huge variety of process’s including internal and external grinding, jig grinding, turning, milling, electro polishing, EDM (various) laser cutting and welding, 3D printing and heat treatment.

Brian King founded Smithstown Light Engineering in 1974 as a machine shop, quickly growing into the design and supply of plastic injection moulds and press tools for the electronics industry. It later moved into contract manufacturing for the medical device sector and in 2011 was taken over by his son, Gerard King. From there it has gained national, and even international recognition and has more than doubled in size in the last two years alone.

Gerard King comments that his teams search for new and advantageous technologies is a constant and ongoing one and that we have a constant policy of reinvestment. "Most of our machines are no more than five years of age. We’ve got to get faster, more accurate and more cost-competitive, and the only way to do that is to increase automation levels and be upfront with the latest machining technologies as they hit the market.” As well as new technologies, Smithstown Light Engineering is also not afraid to employ new techniques. “While a lot of companies in our sector are concentrating on traditional milling and turning, which we’re also good at, we take on higher risk processes that aren’t as commonplace to give a very wide service offering. Having a wide array of grinding disciplines is just one of our processes that’s separating us from the crowd. You must embrace the latest technology as indeed we do with our new grinding processes, and we are using the latest, very fast linear axis drive type grinding machines from Tschudin and Rollomatic. We’re trying to reduce the endpiece price to our customers and of course that’s what our customers like to see; yearly cost reductions and a company that’s going about providing those reductions King says. We are growing and growing very rapidly. We have purchased another 10 acres of land next to our main production units here in Eire and have also opened a facility in Poland for specific machining tasks such as 5-axis machining and mill-turning. The grinding machines that we have purchased from AGS have become a centrepiece for us and are typifying the kind of very high level of production machining that we do here and are delivering the highest level of quality for us. Although we manufacture parts in small volumes, we also get involved in true mass manufacture for certain components which is why our Tschudin and Rollomatic machines were specified with robot loaders and run 24/7 loading parts from pallets. We have to be efficient, and we are efficient and these machines certainly help enable that".

The Rollomatic 630XW machine that’s under order for SLE is designed for grinding many kinds of cutting tools with a more complex geometry whereby its additional 6th “A” Axis, which is unique within the industry, provides an improved accuracy on special tools with a possibility to incline the grinding wheels by up to 45 degrees. This avoids collisions, allows for easier programming, and ensures demanding and highly precise geometric forms, such as those found on special medical tools, can be machined in a single operation. This machine will soon be joining multiple Rollomatic NP50 machines that are already in use at SLE.

The Rollomatic 630XW grinding machine has a general working range of grinding tools from 0.1mm to 20mm in diameter, has a high-speed multi-pallet pick and place loader with positions for up to 1,360 tools as standard, and as standard a 6-position grinding wheel changer holding up to 24 wheels. The ultra-efficient synchronous grinding spindle motor provides constant rotation speed and torque regardless of the load on the motor and this combined with the latest linear motor technology provides benefits such as an enhanced surface finish and reduced maintenance costs. The oil that’s used for cooling the linear motors is the same as the coolant oil; this ensures constant thermal stability during production. The machine is also equipped with a touch probe that determines the exact location of the insert blank after clamping, in order that the software can grind the tool geometry according to the virtual centreline of the blank. This ensures that a run-out of just 2 microns can easily be achieved. As with all Rollomatic grinding machines it comes with their industry leading 3 years parts and labour warranty that is provided by Rollomatic at no additional cost and also free of charge software and free unlimited software updates for life.

The Tschudin Cube centerless grinding machines enable end users such as SLE to achieve significant productivity gains and the machines particularly quick and flexible changeover times help to minimise machine downtime. What sets the Cube machine apart in particular is its very small size and radical open design for easy access. Users only need access to the rear of the machine to perform maintenance and servicing tasks, which means that several machines can be positioned together without any gaps.

The Tschudin Cube centerless grinding machine uses Tschudins patented W-axis which has the workrest blade mounted onto its own CNC axis that allows for parts to be loaded to it outside of the grinding area making loading efficient, fast, and very safe. Traditional centerless grinding machines require parts to be loaded to a fixed work-rest blade that sits inside of the machine between the grinding wheel and control wheel making loading difficult, more expensive, and sometimes unsafe. This also makes changeovers more complex and therefore lengthier. The Tschudin machine overcomes all these issues and claims to be the world easiest and fastest centerless grinding machine to set-up.

Another huge benefit from Tschudin’s CNC workrest blade axis is that it allows multiple parts to firstly move to an initial position for a rough grinding operation to remove a lot of stock material quickly, before automatically being transferred to a second position for a final finish grinding position to enable fine finishes and tolerances to be achieved. For example, it is possible to load 5 parts to the work rest blade and have a machine with 10 grinding wheels; 5 rough grinding wheels and 5 finishing wheels, with the parts being automatically transferred between the two different sets of wheels.

In addition to this, another optional feature, that’s unique to Tschudin centerless grinding machines, allows the workrest blade to move or oscillate backwards and forwards on its own CNC axis during the actual grinding process. This allows finer finishes to be obtained from a relatively rough grinding wheel enabling high accuracy at the best possible cycle times. Linear direct drives on the X, U and W axes ensure flexibility and productivity with the Cube being specifically developed for the grinding of small components with part diameters of up to 20mm.

The Cube’s simple and low-maintenance machine design helps to reduce operating costs. The natural granite machine base and upper structure guarantee the best possible thermal stable, high-precision and a very safe grinding process. Areas of application include plunge-cut grinding, grinding of several parts in a single cycle, oscillation of the component during grinding and throughfeed grinding. This versatility means that the Cube is suitable for a wide range of applications.

The Cube can be specified with a grinding wheel of 150mm wide (option of 205mm) with a 12Kw grinding spindle for grinding up to 63 m/sec and is perfect for the production grinding of parts from 0.1mm in diameter up to 20mm in diameter and brings true sub-micron grinding capability for the centerless grinding of a huge variety of parts.

The multiple Tschudin machines in use at Smithstown Light Engineering are all equipped with Fanuc robots for unmanned shift work whereby specialist medical parts are loaded from pallets, machined, and then placed back into pallets.

A high precision grinding machine requires the best possible filtration and the Comat super-filtration systems in use at SLE were specified and supplied by Advanced grinding Solutions Ltd, along with the machines, and will keep the Rollomatic and Tschudin grinders in a perfect condition for many years to come. Comat manufactures super-filtration systems that deliver ≤ 2-3μm filtration quality (making oil cleaner than unused oil as supplied new) and importantly do so throughout the entire working cycle whilst minimizing lifetime running costs and maintaining maximum coolant consistency. Importantly for end users, the Comat filter systems use their Intelligent Performance Technology that allows them to be remotely monitored in real-time during the manufacturing processes with customers filter systems fine-tuned by Comat to ensure that the optimum filtration quality is always obtained. Today, more than 20,000 machine-tools use Comat Filtration Systems, with more than 120,000,000 litres of metal working oil being super-filtered every single day. Comat operate globally and have a 30-year history in developing the most advanced filtration systems that are available.

Chris Boraston, MD at Advanced Grinding Solution’s comments:
We have long since been involved as a major supplier of grinding and finishing machines to the medical industry and apart from selling many machines to the large OEMs we have now gone onto supplying solutions to their major sub-contract suppliers such as Smithstown Light Engineering as well. We see this trend continuing as the demand for machinery from forward-thinking and highly flexible companies such as SLE that are offering “one stop shops” that encompass a huge variety of processes to their customers increases, as they pick up more and more business for manufacturing medical components of all types. This latest tranche of machines will join the many existing Rollomatics and Tschudin machines in use at SLE and we very much look forward to working with them on this, and indeed on the many other projects, that they are looking at.

AGS (Tschudin) can be contacted via their website www.advancedgrindingsolutions.co.uk And SLE via their website www.sle.ie

The range of grinding and finishing machinery receiving its UK debut can all be seen on the AGS stand 17-320 at Mach. For further information please see www.advancedgrindingsolutions.co.uk or contact AGS on+44 (0) 2476 22 66 11