December 2015

Faced with increased international competition and a steep drop in mining construction, Doyalson-based Kmar Engineering sought to automate its structural steel coping process. As a result, the company achieved a 500-percent increase in production, better finishes and dimensional tolerances, and the ability to produce a wider range of profiles, including pipe work. Located in Doyalson on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Kmar operates out of two factories processing beams, structural steel, tanks, silos, hoppers, ladders, walkways, platforms and much more. The business looks back at a 30-year history, mainly focusing on the mining industry. However, the recent steep drop in mining construction and pressures of both domestic and global competition have led company owner Peter Learmonth to change the way he thinks and the way he works. “Working smarter, concentrating your time on value-adding activities means obtaining greater manufacturing efficiencies and increased productivity,” he says. Kmar Engineering owner Peter Learmonth: “We’ve been doing a fair bit of pipe work since we installed the Metaltek XB machine, cutting all angles, custom shapes, creating weld preps, slots and bevels, […] that’s fairly unique to be able to do that automatically.” Kmar Engineering owner Peter Learmonth: “We’ve been doing a fair bit of pipe work since we installed the Metaltek XB machine, cutting all angles, custom shapes, creating weld preps, slots and bevels, […] that’s fairly unique to be able to do that automatically.” In face of intense competition to drive labour costs down and with the relentless pressure from the market to reduce lead times, Kmar decided it was time to automate their factory. “My aim was to provide steel work to the local market efficiently and cheaper than before,” Peter explains. “We decided to offer custom, versatile steel processing services in the short term to the steel suppliers themselves, […]

  Delcam’s PowerMILL CAM software has been chosen for a new service from Star Prototype that combines additive and subtractive manufacturing. The new service, which Star Prototype calls AddSub Manufacturing, combines metal 3D printing and five-axis CNC machining to deliver quickly complex, low-volume components that would previously have required the input of two separate bureaux. British-owned Star Prototype has been based in Guandong Province, China, for over ten years, where it has been breaking manufacturing ground by using a combination of new technologies, including 3D printing, alongside their traditional counterparts like CNC machining to deliver top-quality parts for a host of applications. The company developed the new service after it identified a significant demand for a one-stop-shop for such components. “Many metal 3D printed parts are no longer used as prototypes but as complex low-volume manufactured components,” explained Gordon Styles, president of Star Prototype. “As a result, many of these parts need certain high-precision features that are virtually impossible to produce with 3D printing alone. Problems arise because most 3D printing companies don’t carry out secondary machining, meaning the customer needs to take care of the finishing work themselves or farm it out to a separate specialist machining bureau.” With the AddSub process, Star Prototype first uses its Renishaw AM250 3D printer to produce extremely dense, high complexity metal parts that are often not possible to produce using traditional machining techniques. The Renishaw equipment uses direct metal laser melting to produce components in titanium, stainless steel or aluminium. The resulting parts are then finish machined on a recently acquired Haas five-axis machine programmed with PowerMILL. Star Prototype sees this combination as being ideal for the production of mating faces, precision bores, tapped holes, spigots and other very necessary high-precision features. Whenever possible, the parts are built on the AM250 in […]