Banking On A Swiss-Type

The CNC Swiss-Type Lathe, Part I

by Peter Zelinski

Brendan Slabe had considered buying a CNC Swiss-type lathe for years. And for years, he and others within Slabe Machine Products, a 100-employee job shop in Willoughby, Ohio, decided against it. The machine seemed too expensive for the benefits it could deliver.

"For one-third the price, we could buy a good conventional CNC lathe with a bar feeder," Mr. Slabe says. "Put that machine next to a machining center, and we could replicate any work a CNC Swiss-type could do for far less cost."

That's what he thought, anyway. Then, last year, his shop landed a job that seemed ideal for a CNC Swiss-type, so the shop decided to take a chance. The company's first CNC Swiss-type landed on the shop floor. "That's when we saw what we had been missing," he said.

Make no mistake, the CNC Swiss-type is a niche machine. The only parts well-suited to it are - to generalize - long, small, complex, and produced in small quantities. However, for turned parts that do fit this description, Slabe Machine now realizes productivity far surpassing what it could achieve on any competing process, including a lathe and machining center in sequence. Mr. Slabe points to two basic reasons why.

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