A long-standing partnership between Brandauer and Bruderer UK is helping the precision manufacturer make headway in a new market.
Tucked away in Newtown, just a few miles from Birmingham, is one of the UK’s best-kept manufacturing secrets. Passers-by or visitors to Brandauer’s 30,000sq/ft facility will have little idea what is going on behind the doors, which it has called home for the past twenty-two years. Inside, it’s a hive of production, innovation and toolmaking expertise that few can match domestically. The 63-strong workforce is busy making electrical connectors that go into 90% of the world’s kettles, parts that dim the rearview mirror in your car and nose clips that are being churned out in their hundreds of millions for use in face masks all over the world. There has also been another project added to the mix over the last twelve months, it involves manufacturing stainless steel substrate frames for a male grooming product exported to the Middle East. This was a prestigious win and underlined its ability to take the customer from developing the complex tooling to producing parts in their millions – to extremely tight tolerances.
To achieve the repeatable quality and volumes, the company made a significant investment in a new high precision Bruderer BSTA410-110 B2, which is capable of up to 41 tonnes, 1600 strokes per minute and features a large 1110mm bed. “We needed technology that could give us the tolerances and speed required by the customer to meet the order quantities, quantities that have more than doubled since winning the work,” explained Rowan Crozier, CEO of Queen’s Award-winning Brandauer. “After a strict competitive tender, the Bruderer was the right choice and is our 26th press of theirs. We know the level of performance and reliability it can deliver and we knew we could work with their engineers to spec the machine so that it not only gave us the control we wanted for this project but could also be deployed to pick up other high volume contracts we might be managing in the future.” He continued: “We haven’t been disappointed. The Bruderer control technology provides automatic ram shut height adjustment while the press is under acceleration and deceleration load for guaranteed process stability and pinpoint repeatability.” “This is essential when you are working with high tensile stainless steel that is just 0.15mm thick and utilising a progression tool that cost over £100,000 to manufacture.”
The Bruderer BSTA 410-110 B2 was selected, customised and commissioned in a eight-month window to meet the stringent delivery requirements of the global client. Teams from both companies worked together to make this happen and to also ensure the machine was set up to be fully automated to include post-production cleaning and re-reeling. This means the press, alongside another Bruderer BSTA 510-110 B2, is capable of producing up to 100 million parts for the customer every year. “You just can’t beat the precision and speed of this technology and the dedicated cell we’ve created for this is one of the best-performing in the business,” added Rowan. Adrian Haller, Managing Director of Bruderer UK, concluded: “We’ve been helping Brandauer produce precision parts since 1976, so it’s great that the firm has once again turned to our presses for its latest product introduction. The tri-modular progression tool has more than twenty different stages and is one of the most complex the company has ever created. Our ram guidance system – exclusively at strip level, helps eliminate displacement between the punch and the lower die giving engineers the ultimate control over the quality of the component. It also plays a big role in reducing tool wear, which I know Rowan and the team were very keen on.” They say never judge a book by its cover and that adage is true when it comes to Brandauer, an SME that makes the little things that make the big things work.
