One step ahead.

“The VISION-III-TT 5‑axis machin­ing cen­ter with rastered HPL table sur­face from Reichen­bach­er has cat­a­pult­ed our com­pet­i­tive edge into oth­er spheres, both in terms of accu­ra­cy, speed and flex­i­bil­i­ty. Today I can say that the trick­i­er con­struc­tion projects are, the bet­ter for us,” prais­es Pro­duc­tion Man­ag­er Josef Dölle. And he adds: “Through­out Europe, we are involved in projects that oth­ers keep their hands off. After all, the more unusu­al the archi­tects’ designs are, the more com­plex the form­work bod­ies, which are made of sol­id wood and clamp­ing pan­els, become.”

“We set up the CNC and banned all the exot­ic machines from the work­shop. Now it’s clamp on, mill, done.”

“We decid­ed on Reichen­bach­er because they have already built plants of this size. They had excel­lent ref­er­ences and they lis­tened to what we want­ed as cus­tomers. Par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant in this project was the need to bring every­thing togeth­er; soft­ware, mate­r­i­al sup­ply and dis­tri­b­u­tion to the racks which had to be linked in, and so we had to work as a team. Reichen­bach­er were very sup­port­ive and it became clear dur­ing the real­i­sa­tion peri­od that we had made the right choice.”

“This machine per­mits staff sav­ings of up to 8 peo­ple. An enor­mous ben­e­fit at times of a short­age of skilled labour”, says Claus Schmid, and his son adds: “We get first-class plan­ing results, as we can work at high­er speeds and use bet­ter tools. More­over, there is less work involved in man­u­al sur­face plan­ing and the drilling of holes dur­ing final assem­bly is no longer nec­es­sary, because they have already been made by the drilling units. And all this with just one machine operator.”

“The goal was to achieve 3–4 steps from raw mate­r­i­al to final com­po­nent in a lean 1‑line pro­duc­tion. In addi­tion, after the last step, the milling process, rework should be exclud­ed. This in turn means that the CNC milling machines have to deliv­er ready-to-use edges and elim­i­nate sur­face dam­age dur­ing pro­cess­ing, as this is the only way to pro­vide the cus­tomer with a high qual­i­ty stan­dard just in time and install the com­po­nents direct­ly in the vehicle.”

“We’ve been work­ing with Reichen­bach­er for some years now and we’re very, very pleased with the results – in fact you could describe it as a suc­cess­ful part­ner­ship. For us, Reichen­bach­er isn’t just a sup­pli­er. We regard the Com­pa­ny as a part­ner who takes spe­cial note of our wish­es and has an inno­v­a­tive and flex­i­ble approach to con­struct­ing the machines in accor­dance with our requirements.”

“For us, Reichen­bach­er is a first-class part­ner. We great­ly appre­ci­ate the fact that they deliv­er on sched­ule, they have an excel­lent price/performance ratio and they pro­vide expert assis­tance when there is a prob­lem to be solved in our factory.”

“Our com­pa­ny is con­tin­u­al­ly chal­lenged to offer the mar­ket of favourably priced prod­uct that meets the high demands of the auto­mo­tive indus­try. In order to com­ply with these require­ments it is nat­u­ral­ly impor­tant to have the appro­pri­ate sys­tem tech­nol­o­gy which is flex­i­ble enough and has a high degree of sys­tem avail­abil­i­ty. For this pur­pose Reichen­bach­er has designed a sophis­ti­cat­ed sys­tem with an impres­sive range of equipment.”

“Gau­gler & Lutz oHG was found­ed in 1983 as a crafts enter­prise and trad­ing firm. Today we per­ceive our­selves as an indus­tri­al man­u­fac­to­ry that offers a com­pre­hen­sive prod­uct, man­u­fac­tur­ing and ser­vice port­fo­lio. Where mul­ti-axes machin­ing is con­cerned, for more than 15 years we have been count­ing on the expe­ri­ence and com­pe­tence of Reichen­bach­er. As a flex­i­ble and dynam­ic enter­prise we place great val­ue in inno­va­tion; here, Reichen­bach­er is our per­fect part­ner. With fly­ing colours Reichen­bach­er has met our demands for dig­i­tal 3D mod­el machin­ery that incor­po­rates the respec­tive kine­mat­ics and an advance col­li­sion check.”

“The com­pa­ny Reichen­bach­er has respond­ed to our needs right from the start and has devel­oped and imple­ment­ed a tech­ni­cal­ly excel­lent solu­tion. This was an impor­tant deci­sion cri­te­ri­on for invest­ing in a Reichen­bach­er sys­tem. Qual­i­ta­tive­ly we have been able to notice a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in the pro­duc­tion process right from the start.”

“To ensure high-pre­ci­sion results in drilling and milling, a lot has been tried out. But nei­ther the plas­ma nor the water jet cut­ting brought the desired result and so it was decid­ed that a CNC machin­ing cen­ter should replace the machin­ing oper­a­tions with the pil­lar drilling machines. The com­pa­ny Reichen­bach­er was the most flex­i­ble of all and was ulti­mate­ly the only com­pa­ny that guar­an­teed that the holes in a gal­va­nized sheet met­al with a CNC machine are precise.”

“The advan­tages of using the VISION-III-ST are clear. For exam­ple, for the lav­ish­ly dec­o­rat­ed cap­i­tal posts, for which, as we tra­di­tion­al­ly milled by hand, we need­ed five hours, we are done with the CNC in 30 min­utes. Depend­ing on the com­po­nent we are faster with a fac­tor of 2 to 8, for exam­ple when the cheeks are caulked or sad­dled. We are real­ly fast, but above all, the qual­i­ty of the work­man­ship is first-class and, in the very last con­se­quence, that is the most impor­tant thing.”

“5‑axis milling was a new tech­nol­o­gy at our loca­tion. Con­se­quent­ly, they sought a reli­able part­ner who not only pro­vid­ed a tai­lor-made machine solu­tion, but also ensured the ful­fill­ment of oth­er process para­me­ters such as time cal­cu­la­tions, accu­ra­cies, tol­er­ances, machine avail­abil­i­ty and inten­sive train­ing cours­es. Since the machine man­u­fac­tur­er Reichen­bach­er Hamuel was a list­ed sup­pli­er in the group, dis­cus­sions could be held quick­ly and a con­crete require­ment pro­file could be defined.”

“We have become much faster and can respond much bet­ter to the accel­er­a­tion in the mar­ket with a ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion of almost 80 %; the qual­i­ty is excel­lent and the effi­cien­cy has increased significantly.”

“The qual­i­ty of all com­po­nents test­ed in-house is excel­lent. Since one works with the Reichen­bach­er CNC sys­tem, there are no more com­plaints. The 5‑axis machine is more sta­ble, stronger, more accu­rate and faster than before.”

“They want­ed a machine designed for at least 15 years or more. The deci­sion was made in favor of the machine man­u­fac­tur­er Reichen­bach­er. Why was that? “From the very con­struc­tive coop­er­a­tion from the begin­ning,” sums up Frans Son­ne­mans succinctly.”

“We can even machine 320 mm thick and 3,600 mm wide pan­els up to 14 meters long on the machine thanks to a spe­cial table attach­ment and the nest­ing func­tion. In doing so, we push a fin­ished milled pan­el five meters beyond the machine table in order to still be able to machine the rear part of the pan­el in this way. This is pos­si­ble by a so-called coor­di­nate trans­for­ma­tion of the soft­ware. In the case of CLT, such a large plate weighs up to five tons, which we move like oth­er plates via a vac­u­um lift­ing system.”

“The OPUS-6K with man­u­al beam table and 2‑circuit vac­u­um block suc­tion cups is per­fect for us, because we now work with state-of-the-art CNC tech­nol­o­gy. A strik­ing fea­ture is the 6,400 mm con­sole table, which is equipped with LED posi­tion­ing strips to indi­cate the posi­tion of the car­ri­ers and suc­tion cups. In addi­tion to the 5‑axis work­ing head and pick-up sta­tion, there is also a mul­ti-spin­dle drilling head with 16 indi­vid­u­al­ly con­trol­lable drilling spin­dles for hole line and con­struc­tion drilling.”