Front axles exclusively machined on UNITWIN6000

February 2, 2021

Rába Automotive Holding Plc shares their experiences with Unisign in a brand new case study

With over one hundred years of experience, Rába Automotive Holding Plc. is one of the largest companies in Hungary serving the automotive industry, employing more than 1700 people. Rába Axle Ltd. designs and produces front axles and axle components and has 7 Unisign machining centres in its factory.

Efficient machining of front axles, Unitwin6000

“Our main market is OEM truck manufacturers located all over the world”, says Tibor Csehi (Manager of CAPEX Programs and Maintenance). “Each year we produce 120.000 to 150.000 front axle beams for well-known manufacturers such as Scania, MAN, Volvo. The axle beams are all processed on Unisign machines. These are the key machines in our machining shop. In 2020 we installed our first UNITWIN6000 machine. It’s interesting to note that all our previous Unisign machines are still in daily use, including the first UNIVERS6 machine we bought in 2003. Nothing beats these machines when it comes to reliability and stability.”

After sales service and maintenance

Tibor Csehi: “Every 6 months a Unisign service engineer visits to carry out regular maintenance on our machining centres. At the same time, the service engineer makes suggestions and gives us information about how to improve the reliability of the machines even further.

“Unisign really is a close partner to us and thinks along with us. We can fully rely on their experience and know-how.”

By the way, one of their service engineers also speaks Hungarian. It’s really helpful to us that Unisign sends an engineer who can talk to us in our own language. It makes the connection much closer and it feels like he’s one of us.”

Precision is key

In recent years, truck and car manufacturers requirements for front axle beams have become much stricter, Tibor Csehi explains. “Nowadays it’s all about precision. The requirements are much closer to the accuracy needed in the aerospace industry. Machining really has to be precise with very tight tolerances. To improve safety and reduce costs as well as noise levels, our clients need lighter front axle beams which require much more precise machining. Thanks to the Unisign machines, we can fulfill these requirements perfectly.”

Total machining solution

Tibor Csehi: “We were always very satisfied with the UNIVERS6 machines and we didn’t want to take any risks by buying a different type when Unisign introduced and proposed the UNITWIN6000 for our extension. But now, after using the UNITWIN6000 for some time, we can say that the UNITWIN6000 even excels the UNIVERS6. What we particularly like about all the Unisign machines is that we don’t need much time to train our people to operate them properly. The machining centres are very user-friendly. Programming is very simple because it’s based on parameter settings. A big step forward compared to traditional CNC programming. For us, the most important aspect is that the machining time with a UNITWIN6000 is less than half of that on the older UNIVERS6 models thanks to the double spindle concept and other improvements.

If there is a problem or we urgently need some spare parts, it’s very easy to get in touch with Unisign and explain the issue. Once we have communicated our request, we always get the right solution quickly. That’s why they call it a total machining solution: with Unisign you get much more than just a machine.”