24Oct

NADCA European Tour 2014: Part 5

The last day of the NADCA European Tour!

The fifth and final day of the NADCA Italy Tour started with a two hour bus ride from Sirmione, our base, to the town of Rivoli, a quiet village outside of Padova, Italy.

SIT la précisa spa

The facility is called SIT la précisa spa and specializes in production for the gas valve industry, which is very demanding with regards to quality die castings (must be leak free) and the price structure for that market.

Our tour guide was Mr. Luca Lago, the plant director, who offered our group a presentation of the company and then we began our plant tour.

The tour started in the melting room where there were two Striko Tower Melters to service 12 aluminum die casting machines. These machines produce high volume gas valve parts 24 hours per day six days a week. The plant is highly automated using sprayers and robots to extract and trim the parts and to layer pack the trimmed castings in baskets. They use very little direct labor, not only in die casting but the machining department as well.

Next we went into the machine department where there are a dozen special indexing machine centers being loaded and loaded with robots. These machine centers have approximately 12-15 stations and the cycle time is very short for the amount of work being done.

The entire plant has been carefully engineered with labor saving cells to minimize the direct labor.  This set up has made SIT a world class producer of gas meter die castings.

Pressofusione Saccense

The next plant we toured was located in Anothe suburb of  Padova, Italy – Pressofusione Saccense.  This company is a second generation family aluminum die caster that predominately serves the auto industry with the gas industry being the second sector serviced by Pressofusione.

The tour was conducted by the production manager, Stefano Luciani, who explained the machine cells and the products they were casting.  The plant was very efficient and the die cast cells were very productive with robotic extraction,trimming, and automatic part marking for traceability. The NADCA group was also joined by the owner, Fabio Voltazza, who is a second generation family operator. Fabio is very committed to the business investing in new die cast machine cells from Buhler.

SAEN

The last facility on the tour was a die shop called SAEN located in the village Brugine, which is located outside of Padova. We toured the plant with Mr. Filippo Volazza who is the Research and Development Director.

The shop specializes in difficult and complex molds for the die cast market. They also have two die cast machine cells so they can offer pilot runs of the die casting, trimming, and even the machining of the casting for their customers. This ensures that the tooling is ready to produce quality approved parts when the all the tooling is shipped to their customer.  This saves a lot of time for project start ups.

After another packed day of European plant tours, we loaded back on to the tour bus and took the long ride back to our base hotel in Sirmione and our last night in Italy.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *