Designing and building a spinning lathe and plastic die to manufacture large warehouse lights for a South African retailer’s warehouse proved to be interesting. Our customer had to find a solution as no lights meeting his customer’s requirements were available.
From the beginning of this project, we knew that we would have to make him another lathe so that production on his other spinning lathes would not be interrupted. We also knew that for the following reasons, it would not be possible to manufacture a spinning die of the required dimensions from steel :
- Firstly the die would be far too heavy for the lathe, making it impossible to remove at the end of the run rendering the lathe useless.
- Secondly, the lathe would never reach the required spindle speed because of the weight of the steel die!
The Solution: we manufactured the die from specialized engineering plastic. This spinning lathe and plastic die project was a success and for some time our customer was the only electrical supply business in South Africa who could offer his customers dia. 600 warehouse lights.
See our capabilities on our General Engineering page.
