ITC has helped design and sculpture company Sebastien Boyesen Environmental Design of Ceredigion, West Wales recently undertaken a number of high profile projects.

Long established design and sculpture company Sebastien Boyesen Environmental Design of Ceredigion, West Wales has recently undertaken a number of high profile projects. These include the 'Deux ex Machina' - a sculpture of two dancers for the Newport Theatre and the most recent project, the ceremonial Key to 'hand over' the new Cardiff Children's Hospital on March 1st. The projects were previously outside the company's remit, until it introduced a CNC machine tool in 2001.

Managing Director Sebastien Boyesen comments: 'I bought the machine to enable us to create more technically challenging pieces using CAD/CAM technology.

As a small business I had little time for extensive training with new technologies.

Luckily, our tooling supplier ITC of Tamworth helped me all the way.' Taking on new technologies was a daunting prospect for Sebastien Boyesen Environmental Design of Ceredigion.

'The new machine meant I was cutting materials like stone, slate, plastics and aluminium using different techniques, speeds and feeds.

It required alternative methods, tooling and lubricants.

I spoke at length with ITC's technical representative Sally Hunt whose advice proved invaluable.

The sound technical advice of ITC has earned my trust and this has been rewarded with us purchasing all our CNC tooling from ITC.' This expert advice was demonstrated with the 'Deux ex Machina' sculpture; the 'life size' aluminium sculpture was machined from ITC cutters.

The company used the ITC 6mm diameter single flute stub cutter to complete the project.

Sebastien Boyesen Environmental Design used 3-D laser scanning software to scan actual dancers.

The company then generated contoured layers through its CAD/CAM software to build an image of the dancers.

The program then mapped the sculpture slices on 5mm thick aluminium.

The 1m/sq aluminium sheets supported by MDF were then machined with the ITC single flute stub cutters.

Running at 1600rpm with a feed of 400mm/minute, the 6mm cutters machined the contours with one pass at the full depth of 5mm.

The sculpture was to be the centrepiece of the opening ceremony of the Newport Riverside Theatre attended by the Major of Newport, the Secretary for State for Wales Peter Hain MP and the leader of Newport council Sir Harry Jones CBE.

This placed Sebastien Boyesen Environmental Design under considerable pressure to meet a tight deadline.

'We estimated the job would take four months to complete and with machining times taking up to a month, we needed to improve production times to meet the deadline.

The speeds and feeds of the tooling contributed significantly toward this.

However, the most important factor was surface finish.

The design of the sculpture ensured that the machined edges of the aluminium were on show more than the surface.

The ITC cutters gave us such a high surface finish the completed profiles did not require additional polishing or finishing operations.

This was a major contributing factor to the sculpture being completed to the required deadline,' continues Boyesen.

Another job currently in progress at Sebastien Boyesen Environmental Design is the pattern making for the major New Battle of Britain Memorial to be sited outside County Hall in London.

'The sculpture of the dancers required over 140 hours of machining using less than 10 cutters.