Its machining time was 21 hours with 4 set up. The accuracy of the part depended entirely on the operator’s skill and the officials were exploring ways to decrease its production time. Before switching over to OMP-60 probe, the cycle time in hours was 12.9 in four set ups, but with the help of Renishaw, it reduced considerably to 7 hours in only one set up. The OMP-60 proved to be very economical also since the cost reduced to Rs 5,518 from Rs 8,806. This can be explained from the table given below.

Founded in 1962, LMW has been pioneers in manufacturing a huge range of spinning machinery. Besides India, the company has managed to make its presence felt in Asia and Oceania region. Twentysix years after commencing this service, the company set up a CNC machine tools plant in collaboration with Mori Seiki Co Ltd of Japan. The plant is one-of-its-kind in India consisting of all the modern equipment that are necessary to manufacture state-of-the-art machine tools and other components.

Two into One

“We were checking slot position and orientation with manual process of inspecting dia gauge and offset 54, 55 with aquocentre. Since this was not as per our expectations, we switched over to Renishaw’s OMP-60 spindle probe with the help of which we did measurement in six offsets, eliminating Dia Gauge and Aquocenter altogether,” the Senior General Manager of LMW, Mr Vishwanath Gupta said. 

“We admire Renishaw for its quality and reliability besides excellent after sales service. This has been continuing since 1988, when we purchased first Renishaw product. We make turret heads using steel EN-9, multistage process on total six offsets X, Y, Z, C, A, within +/- 10 microns. One machine of ours is capable of making three turrets a day while our monthly capacity is to make 120 turrets,” he quipped.

The company, that has 600 employees in machine tools division besides 6,000 in the entire group, in a very short span of time, has sold 7,000 machines in India to 4,000 customers and proudly claims to be the one that brought CNC machines in the country. According to latest estimates, the company has a turnover of Rs230 crore and 70% market share in the country. It has monthly manufacturing capacity of eight horizontal machining centres (HMCs), 20 vertical machining centres (VMCs) and 120 lathes.

Rejection Rate zeroed down from 4 %

 Endorsing Mr Gupta’s views, the Manager (Engineering) of LMW, Mr R Govindarajulu, said, “We were sure that with the help of Renishaw’s OMP-60 spindle probe, we will be able to arrest our problems and that was the reason for which we never tested instruments of other metrology companies and zeroed in on Renishaw. We are happy to have taken the decision (of going with Renishaw) as our productivity increased tremendously since 1988 when we purchased the first Renishaw product.”

 “Apart from helping us in eliminating the problems faced during inspection stage, the OMP-60 gave us confidence to go for assembly directly,” Mr Gupta said and added that as a result of this, the company’s throughput increased to 40%, inventory reduced tremendously while the rejection rate came down to zero from 4%.

The staff of LMW has managed to reduce its cycle time with the use of OMP-60 spindle probe by Renishaw