Kyocera SGS Opens New Technical Centre

Kyocera SGS refurbished and re-opened its Technical Centre in 2018 and MTDCNC’s Colin went along to find out why the company has invested so heavily in its new centre and what value it provides to customers.

Speaking with Dave Colton, the Kyocera SGS EU Sales Director, Dave told MTDCNC: “What we have done is installed a brand new Grob G350 Generation Two 5-axis machine and that is an upgrade on our previous machine and we are delighted to be in partnership with Grob. We have also increased the capacity of the Tech Centre, we can now comfortably accommodate about 50 people for the events we hold on a regular basis. These events can be anything from customer training to open houses or Lunch and Learn events.”

The Grob has been installed for customer training and solutions, application support and R&D. Referring to this, Mr Colton states: “When it comes to customer solutions, many customers naturally have capacity issues, so us coming along and saying we’d like to look at their current machining and how to improve it is difficult. Clearly customers want to improve, but they would be stopping production to allow us to actually look at what they are doing and this isn’t really feasible. So, what we can do now is take the model of the part and a sample of material and bring them to our Tech Centre, where we can program it and machine it applying our know-how. Away from the factory, we can look at their issues whether it be quality or cycle time for example. The customer can then come to us and see the solution we have provided and gauge whether it is applicable to their factory.”

Discussing training, Mr Colton continues: “At Kyocera SGS we have five apprentices and we are all about the future, but the industry is fast moving and there are many new materials being developed such as composites and the new nickel alloys for aero engines. What we are trying to do here is best educate the engineers of tomorrow on how to best approach these material issues. We are also developing a new range of Kyocera SGS products and this will encompass new coatings, new substrates and new geometries. We can’t expect our customers to prove these tools out. So, we produce, grind and coat the tools and we use our new Grob machine to prove-out the new tools and geometries. The main purpose of the facility is to prove-out new technologies and products and literally offer our customers a ‘plug-and-play’ service.”

“Some customers have been pushing us for new products and with their capacity issues, we can show end users the faster material removal strategies of new products and how it can all be applied back at their factories in the UK or Europe. We welcome engineers to visit our facility and put our products to the test.”