Acro celebrates successful year of 3D machining
The move into 3D machining has proved to be a great success for Acro
Precision engineer Acro is celebrating the success of its first year of 3D machining. With over 30 years of experience and success in turned parts, Acro diversified last year with the purchase of a machining center and SolidCAM software package for the milling highly complex shapes.
Over the year, Acro has used the new machining centre to manufacture components for airport security systems, motor racing, automotive companies and the oil industry.
"The oil industry work has been very complex, it is this that convinced us that the investment would be worthwhile. This has been a leap of faith for us," said Mr Pain. "But it's been exciting to see Acro move forward with this type of technology and for the team to develop their expertise in this area."
Acro's past success has been in the machining of high volume turned parts using 24 hour unmanned machines. It has also specialised in the machining of hard metals for critical components for such industries as aerospace and energy. Acro recently celebrated the completion of 850,000 components being manufactured on a single machine.
"The turned components are our core business," said Mr Pain. "The machining centre was initially brought in so that we had more control over the quality of some of the additional processes that our customers required. However, we've found that we can apply much of the programming skills and knowledge of materials that we've developed through the turning side of the business and we've been able to take on some very demanding projects with great success."
Despite recent gloomy economic news, Acro remains optimistic about the future and considers UK engineering to be in robust form. It is still quoting a lot of new projects and many customers are in industries such as energy, which are gearing up for future development.
"If we are seeing anything at the moment, it's a shift away from high volume orders to small batch sizes," said Mr Pain. "It means that we have to spend more time programming machines and setting up, but we have a talented team who can handle this work well and keep the production moving forward."
Images for this article - click to enlarge
Unless otherwise stated, all images copyright © Mercator Media 2012. This does not exclude the owner's assertion of copyright over the material.
