Precision subcontract specialist Merc Engineering UK has recently invested in its second Doosan multi-axis mill-turn centre.

The machine, a Puma MX 2000ST, equipped with an integrated Iemca bar feeder, was supplied as a turnkey package by Mills Manufacturing Technology, Leamington, and is the second Doosan mill-turn centre acquired by Merc in the last nine months The MX machine has been installed at the company's 16,000ft2 facility in Barrowford (nr Burnley) and is already being put through its paces manufacturing a range of complex, high-precision parts (in small-to-medium batch series) from an equally diverse range of materials: aluminium, stainless, titanium, Hastelloy and so on The performance of the MX 2000ST machine can be demonstrated in the following 'before-and-after' example.

Prior to the MX 200ST investment Merc was machining a valve body made from Duplex Stainless on its existing CNC machines via several different machining operations: two turning operations and four milling operations.

Since the introduction of Doosan's MX 2000ST mill-turn technology, the same component can be manufactured in a fraction of the time: a 60-70 per cent reduction in time.

Les Nuttall, Merc's managing director, said: 'We invested in our first MX 2000ST machine late last year [November 2007], and were immediately impressed with the productivity gains we were achieving.

'We found that jobs that previously took four or five operations to complete could now be done in a single hit.'.

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