Since its formation in 1968, Oxford Engineering Limited has built extensive expertise in several selected industry sectors.
As part of the Oxford Engineering Group that comprises Oxford Engineering and Hutton Precision Engineering based in Oxfordshire, the group also includes Oxford Engineering Eesti in Tartu, Estonia. Oxford Engineering has an impressive 75,000sq/ft facility in Abingdon – MTDCNC took a trip to Oxfordshire to find out more about how the company applies zero-point clamping technology from SMW Autoblok.
Speaking with Karim Sekkat from Oxford Engineering, Karim tells MTD: “We do everything from small to very large components and we provide total solutions. This includes milling, turning, fabrication, welding, testing and we are a Tier 1 supplier. During the pandemic, we bought around 20 machine tools as well as software, toolholders and more. So, there has been a lot of investment in machine tools, so we can use them in an automated way. Automation is very important to our business.”
“Reason one for zero point is that we have achieved automated lights out manufacturing with very tight tolerances on large parts already on one machine that has 18 pallets. On our RT-3500 machining centre, we are trying to achieve this on a far larger scale. I don’t believe that we would be successful or competitive without automation. We need to remove waste. The waste is removed if you have high accuracy, repeatability and you do not waste time.”
Looking at the solution provided by SMW Autoblok, Karim continues: “The process starts when we think about setting machine tools. The SMW Autoblok system will eliminate the set-up times. Secondly, you are always chasing things like repeatability, which is very difficult. The system will help us to have a very repeatable program. Then, it is very costly to have good engineers on the job all of the time. We have created stable processes where engineers do not need to be at the machine constantly.”
Looking towards the future and the aspirations for Oxford Engineering, Karim continues: “Artificial Intelligence is something that we have won a competition for, and now and we are going to start this project. It will be a multi-year project. In our industry, we estimate that waste is around 30% and the industry is worth around $130bn a year and this is growing by 7% annually. Therefore, if you are wasting around 30%, that is a lot of billions of dollars that are being wasted. If we can reduce that 30%, that would be a great achievement and it will be something we can pass on to customers. Artificial Intelligence will not replace the engineers we have, but they will be able to concentrate on perfecting the process, the data and making sure we don’t waste time along the way.”
Looking at the considerations for selecting a zero point system from SMW Autoblok, Jonathan Kempen from Oxford Engineering says: “Our considerations were multiple. The first thing was standardisation throughout our group because we have other SMW Autoblok products. Number two, it gives us the repeatability we require. Thirdly, the modular system from SMW Autoblok and the flexibility of design is impressive, as they accommodate what we required. The customisation comes in where we can integrate the system between large machines and the smaller machine tools. This allows us to do product transfer between machines and we can maintain repeatability between the machines.”
“The thought process with this system is twofold. We firstly looked at the system from the repeatability and workholding perspective. Then we looked at how we could achieve palletising without having a pallet loading machine. Another key reason why we went to SMW Autoblok is that they have a very big product range and this allowed us to have different options that we can use with multiple jobs. Zero-point is now something we are looking at implementing across the shop floor. We are doing it on every machine that we can, to different levels on each machine with different workholding products to suit particular applications on different sized machines.”
Concluding on the service and support, Jonathan says: “The service and support have been amazing. The company has accommodated everything that we have requested and the deliveries have been very good, so I cannot fault them in any way.”
