Company background:
Far-UK, established in 2012 and based in Nottingham, are a composite design and manufacturing company delivering light-weighting solutions to their customers. They bring together the combined industry expertise of engineering, manufacturing, and materials. By doing so they have created a design team with fantastic future technologies for building lightness to customers’ products.
With a wealth of knowledge in the automotive industry, Far-UK utilise their experience for the various market sectors within the composites industry, where cost-effective lightweight structures are important.
They offer their services in the design and conceptualisation of new products and technologies, specialising in low-carbon vehicles. For example, in the full service, Far-UK design key structural elements of carbon fibre vehicles, build and validate prototypes for the client and then provide the option of an ongoing supply of structural elements or transferring the key technologies so that the customers can build their own vehicles.
The problem/challenge:
Far-UK developed and then gained a contract to manufacture its innovative body armour laminate. The armour provides protection to customers from stab, spike, and blunt force trauma and is lighter and thinner than the technologies it replaces. The armour comes in a range of sizes from Small to XXXL. It became apparent to Far-UK that the process of in-house cutting of the relevant shapes and sizes of reinforcement for each vest was time-consuming and created high levels of material waste.
The process/solution:
Far-UK approached Cristex to enquire about how our Kit Cutting service could optimise their production process. With our powerful nesting software, our project engineer can nest the various sizes in any orientation required, ensuring a reduction in material wastage. With this process, we provided accurate, clean-cut pieces and can ensure repeatability in quality achieved for future projects.
The result:
By removing the process of hand cutting the templates, Far-UK has reduced material wastage by 22%, compared to their previous system running at a loss of 50%. As well as decreasing the production time of manufacturing the vests and reducing operating costs, which allows them to continuously meet deadline requirements and manage the increasing order demand.
Learn more about Far-UK here
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