Aerospace shop flies through production

Accu-Tec Enterprises, an aerospace CNC machine shop in Oklahoma, has found that using Delcam’s PowerMILL CAM system to program its five-axis machining centre has allowed it to cut the cycle times on a family of four aircraft parts nearly in half while improving surface finishes.

David Steeber founded Accu-Tec with one customer back in 1988. As the aerospace industry has strengthened, so has Accu-Tec’s order intake, which last year saw a growth in turnover of more than 250%, mostly through referrals from its customer base.

To keep up with its customers’ demands for extremely complex air-frame parts, Accu-Tec has made shrewd investments in technology.  Despite the increase in work, the company added only three employees, bringing the total to 15.

Most of the machines in the shop are three-axis Okuma vertical machining centres.  Until recently at Accu-Tec, five-axis work was done by positioning and machining in three axes and then putting the parts on another fixture to align them in a new attitude. Now, the company is stepping up to true five-axis machining because the parts it is seeing have more complex surfaces and irregular shapes. They also require a high-quality surface finish but still need to be completed in shorter cycle times at less cost.