We’re thrilled to announce our recent investment in a new Pinacho STH 400 105x2000mm heavy duty lathe which is due to arrive next week! The Pinacho STH series are market leading flatbed CNC lathes, providing a wide breadth of versatility and precision not offered by other models.

Over the past few months we have been working hard on getting our new website ready to launch. The current website has served us well but is showing its age. The last significant update took place in 2016 and didn’t go far enough to address its structural problems – the site was a good few years old even then.

For the new website we have updated both the design and content.

The biggest challenge facing most UK manufacturing companies is recruiting skilled staff. It seems be at the forefront of most agendas in meetings, conferences and editorials.

The digital economy has made a lot of things easier, including communication and payments, but these changes have gone hand-in-hand with a heightened risk of fraud from cybercrime. Internet-based fraud can take many forms. As individuals, some of us have no doubt had ‘the phone call’ from our bank questioning our recent shopping spree in South Korea. Fortunately, personal losses are usually reimbursed quickly through the bank’s insurance scheme. Risks to businesses are more profound. Companies run the hazard not only of financial loss but also loss of reputation, which can be catastrophic.

CNC honing, like mostcomputer-controlled processes in general, presents some significant advantages over conventional techniques:

The manufacturing sector in the UK isn’t known for its abundance of female employees. Look around a typical manufacturing business and the clear majority of workers from the ground floor to the boardroom are likely to be men. This is especially the case among company directors. Among the largest FTSE100 manufacturers, according to The Manufacturer magazine, only 23% of senior managers are women, while the number of women as a proportion of employees in the manufacturing sector overall – including small businesses – is even lower, at a paltry 15%.

Trepanning is basically deep hole boring with a difference in that it leaves a core. It is an efficient method for drilling deep large deep holes that is more cost-effective than deep hole boring.

The most common use for trepanning is cutting a core out of a larger solid leaving two pieces. The removed material is not reduced to swarf as with drilling but remains a solid billet. The most common example is a solid billet that is left with a hole bored through from end to end and a second smaller round bar that is excised by cutting around it. It can be intended as a roughing operation, destined to be machined further or honed to a finer finish. Alternatively, trepanning alone is sometimes adequate for the job in hand. In fact, people often ask for trepanning when all they want is a deep hole or process bore.

Central Bedfordshire College provide excellent learning and progression for our communities in Bedfordshire and beyond. Their new state-of-the-art Engineering and Construction Skills Centre in Leighton Buzzard and team of industry professional teaching staff are on hand to deliver the most up to date and comprehensive skills training to ensure your future in these exciting sectors.

This is a part that has been trepanned.

Producing blind bores into precision machined components, and responsibly quoting for them, should always result in more questions for the customer. As much as time is short during our busy working days, and these queries often result in a little lost time, it’s always worth investigating at the design stage whether the form required suits the process needed to produce it or will require a non-standard tool.