High performance structural steel drills from Allied Maxcut are helping Lincoln based fabricator and contract manufacturer, J.A. Harvey Ltd, meet demand by delivering extended tool life and increased cutting speeds.
Specialising in the drilling and fabrication of structural steel components and architectural metalwork for the building and construction industry, much of Harvey's work involves the drilling of stacked plate and rolled steel structural sections, which placed a high demand on the company's existing HSS twist drills, requiring regular re-grinding and machine re-setting.
As a number of contracts regularly demand the drilling of between 50,000 and 100,000 holes with sizes ranging from 14mm up to 70mm, the company began trials with replaceable insert tooling from a small number of manufacturers, including Allied Maxcut's structural steel T-A® holders and inserts.
J.A. Harvey's Director, Paul Harvey, explained; "Our initial approach, was to increase the speeds and feeds to enable us to produce each hole much more quickly, exploiting the durability, strength and temperature resistance characteristics of specialised inserts and coatings. Whilst this was achieved and the time to cut each hole reduced dramatically, the additional stress placed on the tool holder and the machine by the quality of steel meant that the insert life was low and in some cases, the tool holders either broke or were damaged beyond repair.
"However, as Allied Maxcut had produced some of the best results during the test and they offered the opportunity to guarantee the tool performance through their guaranteed applications process, we developed the final solution jointly. By using Allied Maxcut's T-A holders with TiAlN and TiN inserts we have been able to improve manufacturing throughput by 25%, increase tool life by a factor of 10 over the original tooling and virtually eliminate the costs associated with drill regrinding."
Allied Maxcut structural steel drills are now used on a variety of machine tools at J.A Harvey, including Bergonzi, Richmond and Kitimura CNC drilling machines as well as manual radial drills and a new Voortman V600 CNC beam drill with a 15 metre bed.
A further benefit that has been experienced is the improvement in the management of swarf as the Allied Maxcut tooling is designed to produce small chips, which is easier to handle and safer than the longer curls produced by standard drills. Also, machine swarf trays can be emptied less regularly and the compact swarf means that recycling skips contain more waste which extends collection intervals and saves money.
Allied Maxcut's structural steel drilling range has recently been extended with the inclusion of its new GEN3SYS™ high performance drilling system, which utilises innovative tip geometry and a PVD AM-200™ coating to give even greater performance.
Click here to go to the Stuctural Steel Overview page
Further information on the structural steel range and any Allied Maxcut product can be obtained by calling 01384 400900.