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Aerospace and aviation industries could barely survive without Mitsui Seiki, even though
many professionals have barely heard of this none-too-profitable maker of the machine
tools that create the most precise parts in engines and airframes.
It’s astonishing how efficiency in aviation can come down to a skilled technician shaping
metal by hand at Mitsui Seiki’s Tokyo plant.
Imagine an airline that enjoys stronger profits because it has introduced efficient new
aircraft, whose advantage over the competition lies mostly in engine design.
The engine, in turn, relies on improved parts with ever more perfect shapes, such as
blisks, disks of compressor blades formed from single pieces of metal.
To make such a precise part the engine maker must have a machine tool whose cutting
head can follow the digitally encoded design to within about 12 microns—0.012 mm., a
fraction of the thickness of human hair.
More engines are built with blisks, and so engine makers need more of the ultra-precise
machine tools that can make them.Credit: MITSUI SEIKI
And the machine tool itself must be built by hand, because it has the finest precision
available. No machine can make another as precise as itself.
So it comes down to laborious laser measurement, testing and, in the end, meticulous
hand scraping of the machine tool’s surfaces to remove tiny thicknesses of excess metal
that come off not as flakes but as powder.
During construction, Mitsui Seiki’s machines are bolted to squares of factory floor that
are actually the tops of massive concrete columns rising from bedrock 120 ft. below—so
nothing vibrates. The temperature in the plant is held within ±0.2C, even as the summer
sun blazes overhead at midday—so nothing stretches or shrinks.
And it takes up to 16 weeks to create a single machine tool that surprises with its
incongruous combination of massive nickel-steel construction, 25-ft. height and the micron-precision usually associated with tiny electronics. Nothing is even slightly loose.
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