£1.1m funding for FC Laser

Ilkeston-based precision laser cutting company, FC Laser, has secured £1.1m in funding from Lombard and NatWest.

The deal has helped fund the acquisition of two state-of-the-art cutting machines that will improve efficiency by 40%, giving the business a significant competitive advantage.
Danny Fantom, managing director at FC Laser, says: “Our new equipment means we will be able to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to productivity, putting us in a strong position to grow year on year.” Veronica Wales, Lombard relationship manager, adds: “FC Laser prides itself on both cost efficiency and the high quality of its products and services, and it has been extremely rewarding to have helped the business continue in this tradition.”
For further information www.lombard.co.uk

Mitsubishi Motors opens stamping shop

Mitsubishi Motors Philippines Corporation (MMPC) has announced the opening of a new stamping shop in Santa Rosa, Laguna.

The opening of the facility follows the inauguration of the Santa Rosa plant in 2015 and represents an important step in Mitsubishi Motors’ plans to expand its presence in the fast-growing Philippine automotive market.
With a capacity to produce 35,000 units, in two shifts per year, the shop enables Mitsubishi Motors to scale-up local production of the Mirage hatchback and Mirage G4 sedan, or Attrage as it is known in other markets. MMPC’s stamping shop facility contains the biggest stamping machine in the Philippines, reflecting the commitment of Mitsubishi Motors to the localisation of automotive manufacturing in the country.
As the first car manufacturer to join the Philippine government’s Comprehensive Automotive Resurgence Strategy (CARS) programme, Mitsubishi Motors revealed that by 2023 MMPC will have produced 200,000 units of the Mirage and Mirage G4. Since its inauguration in January 2015, MMPC’s Santa Rosa plant has already created 600 additional jobs. The opening of the new stamping shop coincides with the announcement that Mitsubishi Motors has raised the local content of the Mirage to 35%, and will increase it further to fulfil a key requirement of the CARS program.
Commenting on the opening of the new shop, Mutsuhiro Oshikiri, MMPC president and CEO, says: “Our new stamping shop enables us to turn the aspiration of localised production into a reality, further building our presence in the Philippines, while at the same time strengthening our offering to consumers.”
For further information www.mmpc.ph

Press line equipped with robots

Martinrea has set a clear goal for itself: to be the world’s best auto-parts supplier.

To achieve its objective, the company and employer of roughly 15,000 people decided to equip its first large-scale press line in Mexico (at its facility in Silao) with a blank loader and multiple Crossbar Robot 4.0 units from Schuler, thereby gaining the ability to provide its customers with maximum flexibility.
The blank loader is suitable for outer skin parts. Here, the new optical line scanner from Schuler detects the precise position of the blanks before they are loaded into the first press. A Crossbar Robot then corrects the position as needed.
The Crossbar Robots 4.0 are the centrepiece of Martinrea’s press line in Silao. They transport parts directly from one press station to the next, and can accurately position the components for any die. Especially where multi-part components are produced, this flexibility delivers an important advantage.
Since the Crossbar Robot is hung on a track, it can cover distances of up to 12 m between press stations. Distances this large are mainly found on older lines, where space was provided for an unloading or turning station. This configuration means that the new Crossbar Robot can replace loading feeders, unloading feeders and part orientation stations in the gap between presses.
The Crossbar Robot is based on a six-axis industrial robot that was expanded by Schuler to include two additional axes: one for the hand of the robot arm and one for the horizontal drive. This enhancement significantly increases the robot’s range of motion, flexibility and output.
For further information www.schulergroup.com

RSD presses forward with £750,000 contract haul

Investment in a new machine from Worcester Presses is helping a Cannock automotive supplier win over £750,000 of new contracts.

RSD Pressings, which supplies components for seats, sub-frames, cross car beams, bumpers and bodies, has installed a new GTX300 Chin Fong progression press and can now take on much bigger parts for tier-one customers and major car manufacturers.
Nearly £350,000 has been spent on the machine and a Tomac TLN4 coil line, with more than £100,000 of funding secured from Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Grants 4 Growth, and the European Regional Development Fund. Three new jobs have already been created as a result of the investment and a further eight will be recruited over the course of the next 12 months once production starts on the projects already secured.
“The components we manufacture at our new facility in Cannock end up in millions of cars all over the world, including Aston Martin, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Volvo,” explains operations director Daniel Burton.
“Worcester Presses came in, looked at our requirements and then developed a turnkey solution that involved the GTX 300, the latest HMI touch screen control and new Tomac TLN4 coil line which will increase our progression and coil feeding capabilities,” he adds. “This machine has doubled our bed size and already led to several new orders that we wouldn’t have been able to take on previously. There is still lots of capacity on it too, which means we are looking for even more new work.”
For further information www.worcesterpresses.co.uk

Combined services for North America

Staufen and Schuler are now offering their combined services in North America. The international specialists work as a single team to provide consulting services and process optimisation for press shops across the USA and Canada.

Process improvement experts from Staufen, together with their counterparts from Schuler, analyse all press shop processes in order to maximise added value. Based on a so-called ‘Quick Check’, untapped potential is identified and leveraged. Then, Staufen consultants and Schuler experts work together to improve the whole value stream of the press shop. Focus topics are process optimisations (such as OEE improvements), die-change optimisation and the implementation of TPM, as well as set-up time and output and logistics optimisations.
With this co-operation, Staufen and Schuler have already analysed many press shops at different customers all over the world. They discovered that the equipment utilisation rate was less than 50% in some cases. The main reasons were wrong or poorly dimensioned tooling, long change-over times, poor system set-ups or bad material feeding.
Based on the specific customer’s results, an individual action plan was developed and its implementation started. Thus, KPIs like OEE, productivity and efficiency were improved significantly.
For further information www.schulergroup.com