Internal cylindrical grinding Annually grind 350,000 high-quality steel sleeves

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At White's Polish plant, the world's leading manufacturer of orbital motors and steering solutions, an internal cylindrical grinding machine S110 from Studer has recently been contributing to efficient production.

It's April when the truck leaves the Studer plant in Biel, Switzerland, embarking on the roughly thousand-kilometer journey northwards. Its destination: the Polish production plant of White in Wroclaw, the world's leading manufacturer of orbital motors and steering solutions. On board is a valuable cargo—the S110, a modern and highly precise internal cylindrical grinding machine. "It's always a great moment when a new machine is delivered," says Paweł Soćko, Senior Process Engineer at White, upon arrival in Wroclaw.

Highest precision at comparatively low costs

"We chose the S110 because it exactly meets our high requirements for performance and quality in production. Thanks to the cooperation with Studer, we can grind our components with the highest precision and at comparatively low costs—thus Studer contributes to our success," he explains. In the modern plant with around 600 employees, the new S110 is now joined by several Studer machines and additional machines from sister companies within the United Grinding Group. These facilitate the production of innovative electrohydraulic high-performance solutions, such as steering systems for agricultural and construction machinery. White has over 50 years of experience in this field and is now part of the internationally positioned Interpump Group.

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The relationship with White has existed for decades, and we are very pleased that our grinding machines can continuously contribute to success here.

Adrian Schürch, Area Sales Manager Poland at Studer.

Since Studer has a local representative in Poland, communication has been very good from the start. However, before deciding on a specific machine model, the requirements of the component to be produced were considered first. "We examined this closely with our specialist team, as always, to find the optimal solution for the customer," reports Schürch.

Specifically, it involves the internal grinding of sleeves made from hardened steel for hydraulic steering systems. It quickly became clear that from Studer's wide range of models, the S110 was optimal for the component geometry and production requirements. "This internal cylindrical grinding machine offers, in addition to high precision, reliability, and compactness, an excellent price-performance ratio," says Schürch. But that was just the beginning. The Studer team specially configured and adapted the S110 for White to ensure that the machine could be optimally integrated into their production.

This process fell within the responsibilities of Cesare Mastroianni, who is in charge of project execution at Studer's internal grinding competence center in Biel.

The optimization is carried out based on the specification sheet, where all technical specifications, the geometry of the component to be manufactured, and operation plans are defined.

Cesare Mastroianni, responsible for project handling at the competence center for internal grinding in Biel, Switzerland

In this process, his team worked closely with the experts at White. "We were very impressed by their technical expertise, professionalism, and constructive attitude. It was a very pleasant collaboration, and we found the perfect solution between customer requirements and technical implementation," emphasizes Mastroianni.

One of the challenges was finding the best balance between short cycle times in mass production and high component quality. Thanks to the optimization, the S110 can grind around 350,000 high-quality sleeves per year at the Wroclaw plant. White is also satisfied with the result: "We produce in high-volume production, and this requires the best solutions in the world—because we cannot afford losses due to insufficient precision or fluctuating capacity," emphasizes Paweł Soćko, adding, "The Studer S110 perfectly meets our requirements; it is stable and reliable."

Soćko cites another reason for choosing the S110: its capability for automation. In the optional loading and unloading cell, a robot picks up the raw parts from a pallet, loads them into the machine, and places the finished ground sleeves into another pallet. This process takes only a few seconds per sleeve. This enables the S110 to operate autonomously for at least an hour without human intervention, and internal functions facilitate quality control.

"In practice, we even achieve almost two hours of autonomy, which significantly reduces labor costs," reports Soćko. This also has great advantages for production efficiency: Employees can attend to other tasks, and the robot ensures a speed and consistency that wouldn't be possible otherwise.