003/2019E CNC Machine for BRL

Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) wish to add a CNC machining capacity to the BRL facilities for the rapid production of one-off machined parts.

The research and teaching within the laboratory require both large (over 500mm on largest dimension) structural parts, and small (under 100mm) precision 5-axis parts with small feature sizes (circa 0.3mm diameter tooling).

The machine would be expected to machine materials such as Medical Grade Stainless Steel, Aluminium Alloys, Brass, Perspex, Acetal, Nylon, PTFE.

It is vitally important that the tendered machine should require the minimum of setup for each job, as the work of the lab rarely will require more than one of each part, therefore the setup time (clamping setup, datum setup, tool setup, file processing etc) should be minimised and automated as far as possible.

On this basis an integrated probing system, tool changer, tool sensor and software integration are required.

We will also supply a number of part files (3 and 5 Axis) for which if possible we would like a broken down time scale for producing from a bare machine, including machine setup time, tool setup time, part/post processing (to generate code), datum setting and machining time to produce. (See Appendix B and attached files).