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Competitive Quotes Win Business from College
01 Dec 2003
Educational establishments and research facilities are a significant source of subcontract machining work, particularly as many are winding down their internal facilities, but budgets are always tight and quotes have to be realistic. Imperial College in London, for example, recently put out the machining of components for a centrifugal compressor to the company offering the most competitive quote, which was Holifields in Abingdon.
While this work was in progress at Abingdon, the contractor received a further contract another department within Imperial College for very high precision reaming of two bores in rotor components. These were also one-off jobs.
Machining of the 800mm diameter, cast aluminum elements that make up the compressor casing included two set-ups on a Colchester centre lathe to turn a face and an O-ring groove plus a location step on the reverse. As the castings were thin-walled, they needed a certain amount of engineer's 'feel' during machining to achieve a satisfactory result.
The parts were transferred to a Hitachi Seiki VS40 vertical machining center where the bores were interpolated, single arrays of 20 holes were drilled around them, and one set of 48 equi-spaced holes was drilled around the periphery of the upper part at a 780mm PCD, the lower part receiving two similar sets of holes.
www.holifields.co.uk
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