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Grinding with High Precision
METZ
Company Metz is located in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, and was founded by Wolfgang Metz. His son Daniel entered the business in 2009. Now the graduate industrial engineer is managing director and intends to maintain Metz’ specialisation in milling tools. About 70 percent of orders are for regrinding and the rest is for special tools. The smallest tools have a diameter of three millimetres, the largest 32 millimetres. Work is carried out in one shift. At night, the production of special tools runs autonomously.
Powerful FANUC Control System Gives Metz the Competitive Edge
The regrinding of milling tools and the production of special tools are the business of Metz Metal Cutting Tools. This small, flexible company focuses on quality - in the interests of its customers.
However, this only applies to the breadth of the product range. Metz sees the company's strengths in the fact that “we deliver quickly, flexibly and in high quality.”
Depending on the tool and customer requirements, the achieved tolerances are in the range of up to ± 1/100 mm. This is not always based on the accuracy required for the cutting process, but on the process, reliability resulting from the use of precise tools.
With the current size of the company, we are very flexible; we don't want to compete with large tool manufacturers.
Daniel Metz
Managing Director
At Metz, six ISOG 20+ machines with FANUC CNC and software from the Swiss specialist MTS AG are in operation. FANUC’s technology has convinced Metz thanks to short position control cycles and the high resolution of the control system. Qualities that an operator can optimise by experience in the two-dimensional field can only be achieved in simultaneous 5-axis operation, as in tool grinding, by a powerful control system.
As the machine equipment and user interface are uniform every employee can work on any machine assuring short set-up times and keeping training costs low.
A 3D simulation of the grinding process is indispensable. Metz: "Before we introduce new tool programs, let's take a look at it in 3D." Ideally, the CAD data of any new tool is recorded and adapted. "We do not grind according to a standard program, but actually adapt our work steps to the condition of the tool." This can be done either at a separate programming station or directly at the machine’s CNC. Collision monitoring is essential here.
Daniel Metz is rather reserved when it comes to "Industry 4.0" - and yet he has already realised some elementary points. The company’s flexibility in production down to batch size 1 results not only from a uniform machine park, but also from networking of the entire operation.
In addition, a large monitor displays all current order data in the workshop: Which orders have priority? Is the order on schedule? Which items are still missing to complete an order? What is the lead time per order? Daniel Metz simply wrote an app for the web-based system that visualises the production data from a central database.
Metz: "We want our processes to be as lean as possible. That's where we stay slim. And we remain flexible in this respect.”
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