Spooner Engineering Systems

Spooner Industries has set up a fully integrated manufacturing operation incorporating Radan, Autodesk Inventor, the laser, the press brake and Microsoft AX business system. A bespoke Radan function speeds up the process of creating nests simultaneously from a number of works orders, contributing greatly to their ability to manufacture one-off products very competitively. “The lead time depends on the size of the job, but we can have a drawing issued in the morning and potentially start cutting in the afternoon. Previously, we couldn’t even dream of starting the manufacturing within a couple of days,” says Nick Murgatroyd, AX Materials Controller. Operating with 125 employees from 60,000 square foot premises, including in house testing and R&D facilities, Spooner manufactures products ranging from dryers, coolers, air turns and stabilizers for the paper and non-woven industries With the drawing office using Inventor as their main CAD system, a number of standard models have been set up as the starting point for most new designs. “This library of parts is invaluable, because while our end products are bespoke for every customer they do consist of similar parts.” The drawing office can design parts which are test-proofed on the software before being approved for manufacture. Once the team are happy with the finished model it is exported into AX, which creates the works orders – then the parts are cut on the Trumpf laser, before moving on to the Edwards Pearson press brake for shaping. Whether Nick Murgatroyd uses fully automatic nesting or finalises the nest himself with the manual nesting function, depends on how many parts they’re producing in the run. “Irregular shape nesting is absolutely amazing, regarding how well it can get irregular shaped parts into the sheet with effective material utilisation. If I’ve got 200 or 300 works orders which are all the same I’ll simply run the automatic nester for a few moments.” And as part of a push to reduce the number of remnants he has recently started to create nests for parts that are to be used for different jobs, and even for different customers.

For more information on Spooner Engineering Systems talk to Spooner Industries Ltd