Not many companies can claim to be tooling-led but Westminster Bedsteads comes closer than most. Its Unimerco tooling is a key factor in its exceptional production performance.
The precision and strength of Unimerco’s tooling has resulted in the removal of two separate sanding operations, raised throughput (in conjunction with a new jig system) by around 20%, reduced set-up times by a similar amount, and is providing crucially better quality than before.
Westminster Bedsteads is part of the Silentnight Group. It has a 6,000m² plant in Wrexham, producing up to 1,000 beds a week for companies within the group. It has its own designer, enabling individual designs to be submitted for consideration by associate companies.
Positive impact
With successes such as Westminster Bedsteads, Unimerco – a leading manufacturer and designer of tooling – has no doubt about the kind of positive impact that its UM Profile tooling can have on production. The company calls it ‘a revolutionary system which opens up new ways of manufacturing’.
High performance and flexibility are some of the advantages, achieved by the following major features:
Unimerco’s UM Profile is designed and produced according to safety standard EN-847. And, in addition, standard or special versions of UM Profile tooling can be produced and delivered in two or three week’s from Unimerco’s plant in Lichfield, Staffordshire.
Unimerco’s tooling technology has proved especially suitable for the largely pine-based production at Westminster Bedsteads. It also uses some other solid timber as well as board materials such as MDF and chipboard.
Careful sanding
Previously, bed components such as headboards, largely machined on two CNC routers and a point-to-point machining centre, needed to be carefully sanded. This was to ensure the finest possible finish and thus avoid the raising of the grain following dipping in a water-based finish.
This was the heart of the problem. Westminster Bedsteads saw dipping as a major production advance. The introduction of dipping, using water-based finishes, posed a difficulty of cutter finish, particularly on cross-grain cutting. Once the components were dipped the grain raising became all too apparent. ‘Some of it was horrendous,’ says mill manager Dave Bromley.
Cost factor
While the introduction of hand sanding at various stages in the production process helped to alleviate this difficulty, it clearly added a significant cost factor.
The introduction of innovative UM Profile cutters, with their greater adaptability and the use of mirror finish inserts made from a special grade of carbide, has meant that workpieces are produced much more swiftly and emerge with a remarkably smooth finish, one which needs a minimum of sanding.
Components handled by the CNC machines are still sanded but only with a powered hand-fladder, an application carried out by the machine operator during the CNC production cycle.
The use of this more precise tooling has also allowed designs to become more adventurous. While there may previously have been a tendency to opt for designs that caused the least difficultly in terms of sanding and grain raising, there is now no such restriction. Accordingly, bedheads in particular now incorporate a number of notably imaginative designs.
The Unimerco tooling has also proved its strength in other ways. With its previous tooling Westminster Bedsteads was, on average, resharpening cutters every 50 headboards. Now 200 headboards are produced before sharpening is required.
Unimerco has also been a success on moulders that Westminster Bedsteads uses for the production of a variety of solid components, such as side rails. While these were once being run at comparatively low speeds (sometimes as low as 9m per minute) in an attempt to achieve a fine finish, they are now equipped with Unimerco cutter blocks, enabling speeds of 13m a minute to be the norm – and with no profile sanding being required. In addition, resharpening has been reduced to a fifth of its previous figure.
Westminster Bedsteads has its own toolroom handling a variety of demands. However, it knows that when it sends Unimerco cutter inserts back to the Lichfield plant it can expect replacements within a week.
Instant solutions
When the company first asked Unimerco whether it could offer improvements in tooling it obtained a virtually instant response. Unimerco sales executives are each equipped with a laptop loaded with the company’s own Unical software. This enables them, once relevant information has been obtained from the potential customer, to determine which kind of tooling will provide the answers and the level of savings that can be achieved.
In the case of Westminster Bedsteads, what was once computer screen data has been turned into welcome reality.
