Industry News

Stavar brings an impressive track record of manufacturing industry experience, having spent more than 16 years as General Manager at Sheetmetal Machinery Australia, a leading supplier of innovative high-precision sheetmetal machinery, based in Ferntree Gully, Victoria. She has been a member of the AMTIL Board for six years, and succeeds Paul Fowler, Managing Director of Dimac Tooling, who is stepping down having served as President since 2013. “I look forward to continuing the great work AMTIL is involved with, representing our members interests and supporting the current initiatives such as the AM Hub, Export Hub and the Entrepreneurs Programme,” said Stavar. “The Australian manufacturing industry is undergoing change and to remain competitive we need to become innovative, adaptive and flexible; embrace the latest technologies; and improve efficiencies, training and education to be the best we can be in the global economy. The AMTIL Board will focus on developing and supporting strong networks in helping businesses grow within the manufacturing sector.” Together with the AMTIL Board, Stavar will be responsible for providing strategic leadership over AMTIL’s full…

The tour offered some excellent insights into the ways that others are engaging in the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, some of the general practices being implemented, and ideas regarding the future of the technology. We visited three sites: Bosch, FIT, and Toolcraft. Bosch – Integrating 3D printing  The Bosch facility was a modern mass production site that utilised CNC machines, robots, and people all working together to produce three main parts: high-pressure fuel pumps, gearbox solenoids, and drive-by-wire throttle systems. Currently the facility only uses “digital twin” for very small production runs and compares the real run to the simulated production run. They do not digitally trace their production components. Bosch uses three main pieces of software for monitoring and reporting of the facility – these are  Nexeed MES, PowerBI, and Tableau. With these packages they can monitor machine outputs, variations and downtime, and plan maintenance. They are in the early stages of applying machine learning to solve production issues pre-emptively. In the last three years Bosch has expanded its facility by adding in some…

According to Oxford Economics, which has just released a report on this subject, current estimates of electric vehicle market penetration over the next decade is expected to have a negative impact on machine tool demand, but not catastrophic. Those countries that have made a significant push towards e-mobility impacted the most. The importance of the automotive industry to machine tool manufacturers is highlighted by the fact that the automotive and automotive supplier industries made up 48.2% of German machine tool demand in 2015. The remaining demand is made up from a range of industries, such as metal products, precision & optical instruments and aerospace. In the US, although only 4% of machine tool demand comes directly from the automotive sector, 14% of demand comes from machine shops and nuts & bolts manufacturers with considerable secondary…

LaserBond is a specialist surface engineering company founded in 1992 that focuses on the development and application of materials, technologies and methodologies to increase the operating performance and wear life of capital-intensive machinery components. The company operates from facilities in New South Wales and South Australia. The exceptional growth of the company has been built on its pursuit of innovation and technology leadership in three fields of surface engineering: the tribology of wear and the performance of heavy industrial components; metallurgy and the science of high-performance materials; plus the optimisation of a wide range of materials and application methodologies. Tribology can be further defined as the science of rubbing interfacing surfaces in relative motion. It concentrates on contact mechanics of moving interfaces that generally involve energy dissipation and encompasses the study and application of friction,…

Meeting production requirements can often make it tough to schedule in downtime for essential compressed air system maintenance. However, following the maintenance schedule prescribed by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) is essential in order to ensure that a compressed air system continues to reliably produce high-quality compressed air. Failure to do so could lead to costly and unplanned downtime as well as premature wear of components and consumables. And together this could also have a negative impact on the expected life of the compressed air equipment. However, even if you follow the prescribed maintenance schedule, there will of course be larger maintenance jobs that need to be completed which take longer to do. The festive season often presents the ideal time. Holiday shutdown The festive season is one of the longest periods of time in the year when most manufacturers…

D&T is the preferred fabrication supplier to many major construction companies in Illawarra, and is regularly contracted for projects by the Kiama and Wollongong Councils. Specialising in strata management multi-story residential projects, D&T has the expertise to design and install balustrading to exact specifications for large and small jobs. The investment in Demmeler tables from Leussink Engineering enabled D&T to produce extremely accurate work, which opened doors to bigger clients and larger orders. “Within six months of purchasing our first table we changed our workshop around to fit another Demmeler table in,” says Luke Szabo, Business Director at D&T. “The decision to bring this system into our factory impressed our clients with the level of accuracy we were able to achieve. And because of this improved accuracy, the work came flooding in from our mining client.” Demmeler tables enabled D&T to produce work precisely to the millimetre and exactly as per the stringent requirements of their mining client. “Building exactly to the sizes required is key,” Szabo adds. “And with…

Benning Blueberries is a family-owned business spanning three generations, which has been farming for the past 17 years in Wodonga, New South Wales. The farm grows approximately 140 hectares of blueberries, ten acres of raspberries, and has 5,000 macadamia trees. Over its years of operation, Benning Blueberries has faced a number of issues with its blueberry growth and supply, its labour, output consistency, sorting accuracy and speed, and all the challenges of meeting the growing demand for high-quality blueberries. Before it made contact with GP Graders, it had a grading system that had served its purpose in terms of the prevailing requirements when it was originally purchased. However, those needs and requirements had since changed and a more advanced grading technology was required. Since 1963, GP Graders has been manufacturing machinery to meet the needs of growers and packers around the globe. The company is the leading international supplier of fresh produce grading…

Walking the factory floor at Sutton Tools’ headquarters in Thomastown, Victoria, defies what many would expect of a firm that each year produces some 20 million drills, taps, milling cutters and specialist tools for industries, ranging from medical and mining to aerospace and automotive. It’s clean. Really clean. “We used to be a far more manual operation up to the 2000s, with an environment not as clean as it is now, and more moving parts on the loading mechanisms” says Sutton’s Engineering Manager Tim Schurmann. “Our first robot was about 15 years ago, a Drake thread grinder that had one robot fitted to it. “We decided this was a pretty good idea, so we purchased some more robots and we started to install them ourselves. But we soon found we needed help from somebody to integrate them to the control system on the CNC machines, so we got Pat in to do that work.” By “Pat”, he means Pat Green,…

In addition to designing and producing trailers for general freight, temperature-controlled freight and bulk transport, MaxiTRANS manufactures rigid truck bodies, and supplies parts and consumables through its MaxiPARTS division. As such, it is a longtime user of SolidWorks and has been utilising SolidWorks PDM to assist in product management for almost a decade. Over this time an ongoing relationship was established with Central Innovation – whose development team was able to assist with custom-built tools to help expedite data delivery of Excel files into its production department. This laid the groundwork for Central Innovation’s in-depth involvement in ‘Project Transform’, which MaxiTRANS initiated in 2014 to replace 13 legacy IT systems and its now-unsupported core IT system with a new JD Edwards ERP system and other integrated systems across its business. The aim was to improve operational efficiencies by streamlining its business processes and practices while reducing operational…

While the global population continues to grow and age, the gradual urbanisation of our civilisation is creating a plethora of new health risks. The United Nations expects that an ageing global population will precipitate significant social changes – changes for which Tornos has been prepared for many years, especially in the medical and dental sectors. The Swiss machine tool manufacturer has such expertise in the field that it knows it can anticipate the needs of this booming market and meet those demands by providing innovative customised high-performance solutions. Growth and ageing of the population The global population is forecast to grow 16% by 2030. In the same period, the global population will also be ageing. The number of people aged 60 years and older is increasing faster than that of younger age groups and it is expected to double by 2050, and even triple or more by 2100. This demographic trend of ageing opens up new prospects with regards…

In falling to 48.1, the Australian PMI slipped below the 50-point threshold separating expansion from contraction for only the third month since July 2015 (readings below 50 points indicate contraction in activity, with the distance from 50 indicating the strength of the contraction). An increasing pace of contraction in new orders suggested a weak Christmas period may be ahead for Australian manufacturers. The weaker manufacturing sector in November was driven by contraction in employment and new orders and sales and production were barely steady. The overall weakness was not evident in the large food & beverages sector, which reported a further strengthening of performance. Both the machinery & equipment and the chemicals sectors also continued to expand in November, with weakness concentrated in the metal products, building products and TCF & printing groups. “A decline in performance across the diverse manufacturing sector had been telegraphed by the weakness in new orders in recent months,” said Ai Group Chief…

Security, natural ventilation, ultraviolet (UV) and insect protection, as well as safeguarding from the risk of bushfires – these are just some of the many reasons that numerous buildings throughout Australia are equipped with security window and door screens. Prowler Proof has been manufacturing premium security door and window screens to meet this myriad of requirements since 1984. Remaining proudly Australian-owned and -made, the company delivers the highest-performing doors and screens in Australia thanks to a manufacturing process that includes welding the security door and window screens, making them stronger than any screw or rivet. All Prowler Proof door and window screens are manufactured in the company’s high-tech, fully automated facility in Banyo, Queensland. The factory is currently the only manufacturing facility in Australia that has achieved the rating ‘World Class’ on the PROBE Manufacturing global benchmark, one of the world’s…