The UK’s leading manufacturer of agricultural ploughs, Dowdeswell is achieving unprecedented levels of productivity, performance and tool life by using AMEC tooling to machine fabricated and cast steel components used in its extensive range of heavy duty ploughs and harrows.
Based in Southam, Warwickshire, Dowdeswell has built its reputation on manufacturing high quality, durable and reliable ploughing systems that are well engineered and easy to use.
As the agricultural industry has changed over the years, there has been a gradual change to larger farms requiring more heavy-duty equipment, which can deliver the levels of performance demanded from commercial farming. Consequently, Dowdeswell has followed this trend and has recently invested in a Dooson flexible machining centre, which has replaced two ageing Mazak machines in its large manufacturing plant.
AMEC’s initial involvement with the Dowdeswell began around two years ago, when they were asked to evaluate the drilling performance they were achieving with existing twist drills with a view to improving productivity and tool life. By replacing the existing drills on the one remaining Mazak machining centre with AMEC’s T-A replaceable insert system, the tool life increased by a factor of 5 with a corresponding improvement in productivity and reduction in the cost per hole.
With a successful working relationship already established, Dowdeswell turned to AMEC again in early 2010 to provide high performance tooling for its new Dooson machining centre. Dowdeswell’s Technical Manager, Jason Stringer explains: “We had seen demonstrations of the incredible performance that can be achieved with the AMEC GEN3SYS tooling, but our existing machinery was a little too underpowered and not rigid enough for us to enable us to use GEN3SYS. However, when we upgraded our plant with the new machining centre, to meet demand for our products, we revisited GEN3SYS as we now had the opportunity to use high performance tooling to achieve the production efficiencies and productivity we were looking for.”
The diversity of components and the varying sizes required to meet the needs of such a broad plough range has meant that the tooling has to machine both cast steels and welded fabrications, such as the plough’s headstock, which is made from tough boron steel supplied in an annealed state.
In addition to using GEN3SYS tooling in a wide range of diameters to drill tight tolerance clearance holes, which helps maintain rigidity in the plough, AMEC AccuThread 856® threadmills are also used as well as a 90mm diameter Revolution drill and a custom 150mm diameter Core drill.
“Across the board, we have seen significant improvements in productivity, manufacturing efficiency and tool life,” added Jason Stringer. “The combination of a high quality machining centre and our AMEC tooling has given us a much more flexible manufacturing solution that has achieved some excellent results. For example, we now use and AMEC 90 mm Revolution drill to machine a 60mm deep hole in a single operation in Weldox in a matter of minutes. Previously, this required different drills and a sequence of boring tools, which took hours to complete and it’s a similar story across all the components where we use the AMEC tooling.”
