CNC Machining

Almost all of our CNC milling is undertaken on our Takumi Seiki V8a Vertical machining centre controlled by a Mitsubishi Meldas 500 controller running Fanuc programs. The machine has a 24 position tool carousel, XYZ travel of 1050mm x 560mm x 560mm and a spindle speed of 8000 rpm. Having solid cast bed-ways, the machine is sturdy and stable allowing us to cut pretty hard materials and still achieve very good surface finishes. Nearly all the programming is done off line on a powerful PC running NCGCAM 3 axis machining software.

We also run and old knee mill with DC servomotor drives. It is simple to program and extremely versatile. It is smaller that the Takumi and has a smaller cutting envelope but again, all hard machine slides so it’s still accurate to under 25 microns despite its age.

CNC turning at Cranford Engineering is the undertaken on our Harrison Alpha 550. It is one of the biggest lathes in Surrey having a swing of 800mm through the gap or 560mm over the bed. It is 1500mm between centres. It is mostly programmed offline and is capable of turning very complex curves or shapes.

To round off the set, we have a CNC46 spark erosion machine made by Sparkatron. It has a tank size of 1100mm x 600mm x 330mm and a axis travels of 497mm x 396mm x 170mm. See our spark erosion page for more details on the process. A CNC spark erosion machine serves toolmakers like us extremely well. It allows us to cut multi cavity tools with one setup. For example a ring of cavities in an injection mould or a matrix of cavities in a compression mould.