Turner’s Engineering, a prominent Australian company offering custom design and manufacturing of high quality Excavator and Wheel Loader buckets and attachments, as well as manufacturing, conversion and refurbishment of fuel, service and water trucks has invested in an Agile Flex 35D to service their Mazak QT250 II MSY.
Turner’s have specified their Agile Flex with eight drawers, a top pallet option for longer parts - 250mm, and a part re-grip for back-to-back OP10/OP20 operations. Each of the eight drawers and top pallet on the Agile Flex can be configured with a unique product, allowing a single run to include up to 9 unique product types.
The Agile Flex has brought about an impressive 35% increase in finished parts for Turner’s Engineering. We spoke with Douglas Miller from Turner’s to find out more.
Douglas explained the investment in the Agile Flex machine loading automation: “We were looking into expanding our range of CNC machines to assist in handling the high volume of work that we have and during our research we came across the Agile Flex system. Upon further investigation the Agile Flex proved to be a more cost effective and flexible option for our immediate needs.”
Turner’s run high volume round parts from 38 to 150 mm diameters, ranging from simple plate bosses used for prefabrication on excavator bucket ears, to high tolerance hydraulic components.
Prior to installing the Agile Flex the only option available to Turner’s was to run longer days with available staff. This combined with delivery requirements dictated that they needed to run lower volumes of parts in more frequent batches to meet deadlines. This was causing a significant increase in unproductive time with more setup and tooling changes.
Douglas described the benefits they have realised at this early stage: “The increased production over the day is significant, on early numbers we are seeing a 35% increase in finished parts over a normal shift when compared to running manually. In addition, the Agile Flex is allowing staff to move on to assembly, or setup on other machines, increasing productivity beyond the machine it is installed on.”
That’s some impressive agility in CNC automation for Turner’s Engineering.
