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.

Watch our appearance on #SwarfandChips, the weekly engineering YouTube show from MTD CNC. You can watch the video on MTD CNC's website, YouTube or by clicking play below.

We have recently been enjoying utilising our latest Colchester CNC lathe – the newest addition to our CNC large turning section here at Hone All Precision. The Colchester Lathe Company, based in Heckmondwike in West Yorkshire, is one of the world’s leading producers of CNC lathes and supporting equipment.

The process of gundrilling was initially developed to create uniform sized holes in artillery pieces and rifles. Techniques and technologies were set in place to give repeatable, highly accurate results on mass armament production lines, from the late 19th century onwards. Gundrilling is still used in the defence industry, but has far wider applications too.

When carried out using the right equipment and with the right training, gundrilling delivers reliable results each time. This is the reason the technique – which you may also know as deep hole drilling – is so widely used in manufacturing. Hundreds of aerospace, automotive and medical components, among others, use gun drilling to produce precision holes of almost any length.