The Future is Now

This specialist subcontract sheet metal manufacturer filled its current capability gaps with new technology for tomorrow.

Brian Palmer, Managing Director of Tharsus Engineering Ltd., has a clear vision of where his company's future lies ? and he has invested in new technology to give him the capacity to achieve it.

"What we want to do is move up the knowledge ladder," he says. "We have actively tried to specialize in lower-volume, higher-specification work, because if you only quote on volume jobs you risk losing them abroad. A good job for us is one where we can apply a bit of thought and make money by doing it intelligently. There are still jobs where we are quoting against drawing, but more and more we are doing the design, making the prototypes and taking it into production."

Based in the North East of England, Tharsus specializes in providing sheet metal work to industrial sectors across Europe, including rail, telecoms, electronics, defense and transport. By using sophisticated modeling tools, their engineers efficiently produce technically complex, small batch sheet metal and fabrication work.

Their new equipment includes an LVD Axel CNC laser cutting system, two LVD Easy-Form® press brakes and CADMAN B 3D offline programming software. The whole package complements existing capabilities, including Radan offline programming software, so that the company has the best possible range of equipment to do the type of work that it wants to target.

According to Palmer, the fundamental reason for buying the laser was that the company's two punch presses were at saturation point and he needed additional capacity. "The laser opens new markets to us and gives us new capability, but it is our job to make sure that we put profitable work on it."

Tharsus can work from custom drawings in formats ranging from traditional paper to 2D CAD formats (such as DXF) through to complete models in STEP, IGES or SAT formats. The LVD 4kW 3 m x 1.5 m laser profiling machine that cuts up to 20 mm mild steel, 12 mm stainless steel, and 10 mm aluminium in lots from 1 part to 10,000 parts, quickly and efficiently with a minimum set up cost.

Though the temptation to go and fill up its capacity is there, the company plans to be intelligent and put the work on it that is going to give them the margins. "For example, we are unlikely to have a competitive advantage over a specialist laser shop," explains Palmer. "One of the skills we must develop is routing jobs intelligently. This laser has are lot of advantages, and it was the one bit of capability that our business didn't have."

What clinched it for LVD was the Axel's cost-to-performance ratio: the machine has an X-axis travel 3150 mm, Y-axis travel of 1600 mm, and Z-axis travel of 100 mm, with maximum positioning speeds of 120 m/min X-Axis, 120 m/min Y-Axis, 169 m/min X-Y Simultaneous, and 30 m/min Z-Axis. It has a repetitive accuracy of ± 0.025 mm and positioning accuracy of ± 0.050 mm/m.

As with the Axel laser system, the new PPEB press brake with an Easy-Form Laser system was also chosen to fill in the gaps in existing capability. Tharsus already had a press brake with a pressure referencing bend compensation system, but the Easy Form equipment offers a number of advantages on certain types of part.

"The pressure referencing system needs to be operating at 10 percent of maximum tonnage, but on many of the smaller and thinner parts that we form, the bending force may be measured in hundreds of kilos rather than tons," says Palmer. "For this reason, this press brake complements our existing capacity and offers us advantages in certain areas. If we use the machines wisely, we've now got all the bases covered."

He continues, "We need this type of system because we are programming offline using the CADMAN B 3D and Radan software and we want to de-skill the forming. Offline programming means we can send the program down the wire to the machine, instead of the machines standing idle while someone does the programming. The operator doesn't have to know how to program or work out how to produce a complex part, and the Easy Form Laser means that angle correction, which is one of the more skilled elements of press braking, is essentially automated too."

The final piece in this jigsaw puzzle is an LVD PPRM electric press brake that takes advantage of reluctance motor technology first developed for the textile industry to achieve far higher bending speeds than conventional hydraulic machines. It can deliver working speeds of up to 25 mm per second and is ideal for bending small- to medium-sized high-precision parts.

Palmer states that before Tharsus had the PPRM, the bigger machines were often only bending at a fraction of their capacity ? using only a small part of the bed length and tonnage available. "Much of the time we were using 100 ton, 3m bed length machines to form parts that only required hundreds of kilos of bend force. This meant they weren't operating anywhere near as quickly as they could have been. The PPRM is a light machine with a small footprint that frees up the larger press brakes to do what they do best. We can move it round with a forklift, and its tooling is compatible with our other machines."

Tharsus Engineering Ltd., Glen Street, Hebburn, Tyne and Wear, UK NE31 1NG, +44 191 483 2816, Fax:

+44 191 428 0063, www.tharsus.co.uk.

LVD Ltd., Unit 3, Wildmere Road, Banbury, Oxfordshire, UK OX16 3JU, 00 44 1295 676800, Fax: 00 44 1295 262980, www.lvdgroup.com.

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