Corus Northern Engineering Services (CNES) has successfully built and installed a large grinding machine for Wyman-Gordon Ltd, a manufacturer of seamless pipes for the offshore oil, gas and power generation industry, based in Livingston, Scotland.
The new grinding machine, which measures 19m in length by 2.5m wide and 4.5m high, weighs approximately 70 tonnes and has a 16m travel for the grinding heads. The machine will supplement the company
Wyman-Gordon manufactures a range of Class 1 rotating parts for military, civil and industrial gas turbines applications. These products include gas turbine engine shafts, structural and landing gear forgings for military and civil aircraft, as well as manifolds, sphere tees, valve bodies and seamless pipes for the offshore oil and gas industries. The Livingston plant employs around 275 staff and the plant covers 477,500 square feet.
The new grinding machine is part of a significant capital investment expansion project at Wyman-Gordon’s Livingston site. The plant boasts one of the world’s largest ‘clam shell’ furnaces, which is used to heat treat the seamless pipes.
After visiting CNES’ workshop facilities in Scunthorpe, representatives from Wyman-Gordon were confident that CNES had the technical know-how and experience to manufacture the grinding machine. In addition, CNES’ Scunthorpe Machining Workshops are fully equipped with heavy duty cranes and lifting gear, plus excellent machining facilities, which would be required to carry out the new grinding machine build. The majority of the new machine (in terms of weight) is in the rails and travelling beam, which had to be lifted in one piece, and so heavy duty lifting gear was required. As Chris Morris, Senior Plant Engineer at Wyman-Gordon comments: “CNES handled the job extremely well and there were few problems during the project. After visiting the Scunthorpe workshops, we were very confident that CNES could handle the work. The workshops had a very professional feel to it, was organised and clean, the approach and organisation were excellent and material was flowing through the workshop.”
As John Backhouse, Business Development Manager Offshore & Energy at CNES states: “Our engineers had to manufacture the new grinding machine from the original drawings. The existing grinding machine at Wyman-Gordon includes both metric and imperial components and so CNES also had to cope with a mixture of original imperial drawings and new metric ones in order to build the new machine.”
CNES received a contract from Wyman-Gordon to build the new grinding machine back in May 2007. The machine was built and ready to ship in November 2007. Delivery and installation – also undertaken by CNES – took place in December 2007 at Wyman-Gordon’s factory in Livingston. The grinding machine has since been placed inside an acoustic chamber at the plant and has just completed commissioning.
Chris Morris continues: “The new grinding machine should cut lead times considerably for process pipe. The working relationship between CNES and ourselves has been excellent. So much so that off the back of this first job, we’ve given CNES additional work, which includes the manufacturing of new safety staircases and platforms for our works. This job is totally unrelated to the grinding machine work but we felt we should give it to a supplier that we could trust.”
For more information on Corus Northern Engineering Services, please visit the website at www.corusnes.com or telephone David Scatchard on 01642 404 698 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
