Portal milling machine investment enables Sawyer Composites’ turnkey project success
Sawyer Composites overcomes accuracy and downtime issues when designing, engineering and manufacturing composite tooling and structures using Zimmermann’s FZU22 system.
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The Zimmermann FZU22 in action at Sawyer Composite. Source | Zimmerman Inc.
“Our older machines increasingly struggled with accuracy, throughput and downtimes,” says J.R. Tubb, a CNC programmer at Sawyer Composites (Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.). This was a primary challenge the company, which specializes in composite laminates and assemblies for aerospace, was looking to solve. Sawyer quickly became one of Zimmerman’s (Neuhausen a.d.F., Germany and Wixon, Mich., U.S.) first customers after it launched the FZU22 portal milling machine on the U.S. market in 2024.
“The FZU22 provided immediate improvement,” says Tubb. “It runs reliably, delivers high precision and its rigid monoblock design allows for significantly faster machining. As a result, our throughput has increased and the amount of required rework has dropped considerably.”
Sawyer Composite, in business since 1992, is ISO 9001 and AS9100 certified, providing its customers turnkey solutions in the design, engineering, manufacture and qualification of advanced composite tooling and structures.
“We have a program for a component that runs on every machine,” says Tubb, referring to the machine’s impact on daily production. “When we machined this part on the FZU22, we finished almost 30 minutes faster and with much better surface quality. The finishing work now takes only half as long. As another example, we had a series of aluminum plates to machine. Thanks to Zimmermann and their service team advice, we now achieve the required tolerance on the first run, without necessary adjustments or rework. That saves a tremendous amount of time and resources.”
Sawyer Composites find the FZU22’s other features — like an enclosed workspace, the minimum-quantity lubrication (MQL) system and the Siemens Sinumerik ONE CNC control system for five-axis machining — to be additionally advantageous when milling composite materials.
“Sawyer shows that, despite the current circumstances, there is significant potential in the North American market and customers are willing to invest when quality and service meet expectations,” says Cornelius Kiesel, president of North America for Zimmermann.
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