Pegasus Profiles has three sites. The main site is in Thetford and the other two are in Andover and near Daventry.
The company has been operating for over 40 years and the Lantek software has enabled Pegasus Profiles to consolidate its waterjet, laser cutting, plasma cutting and flame cutting CNC programming into one system.
Nigel Clark, Managing Director of Pegasus Profiles, explains:
"We cut material up to 500mm thick as well as thin material, extremely hard wear plate material such as Hardox, high strength steels such as Strenx and non-metallic materials including MDF, carbon fibre and foam. This requires us to have a wide range of cutting machinery to suit the different applications. In addition, we also have plough grinding capability with Lumsden grinders which offer a cost effective method of machining the surface area of plate to give a clean bright finish and a tolerance of ±0.25mm."
Pegasus is also able to supply refurbished spare parts and consumables for Lumsden grinders.
Originally, the two different waterjet machines by Calypso and WJS had their own dedicated software, as did the Esprit plasma and Technicut flame cutting machines. As a result, programmers had to learn, understand and use multiple software packages to generate CNC code for each machine.
When Pegasus Profiles installed a Trumpf 3050 laser from MSS Lasers, Nigel Clark realised the company could replace all these different software packages with Lantek Expert and dedicated postprocessors for each machine.
"The Lantek graphics is the same for each machine, so we only have to learn one system. The old systems were machine specific. We have three CNC programmers and each of them had a specialist area. With Lantek, we can make much better use of our programming resources. There is a significant amount of programming to be done as every job is bespoke and consists of a lot of one-off parts. For example, a structural steelwork project may have up to 160 different parts, all of them unique."
The company has around 500 tonnes of steel in stock and processes about 2,500 tonnes every year.
Flame cutting applications include special purpose machines and wind turbine parts, while waterjet is ideal for non-metallic materials or materials that cannot be cut by laser, plasma or flame cutting, such as titanium, where the product would be damaged by a heat affected zone.
To maximise material utilisation, Pegasus makes extensive use of Lantek Expert's nesting capabilities.
"We nest together parts from multiple projects according to cutting process, material specification and thickness. The ability to mix these parts on one sheet of material enables us to maximise material utilisation. The nesting software is powerful and easy to control, enabling us to get up to 80% utilisation and also, with its library of offcut shapes, reuse remnant material, particularly important for some of the costly materials we process."
Data on new products arrives in a variety of formats, from sketches to DXF and DWG files, which can be imported directly into Lantek Expert for programming.
Pegasus Profiles achieves a lead time of around three days from order to delivery for most products, with Lantek Expert contributing through its flexibility and ease of use.
Nigel Clark concludes:
"Lantek Expert is simple to use. It has enabled our staff to be more flexible as they can use one system instead of multiple systems and, the nesting saves significantly on material costs. The superior shop floor documentation generated by Lantek Expert is also a big improvement for us. We are confident that Lantek Expert will programme any machines we install in the future."