Nigel Bargery & Pamela Oakley set up the subcontract precision machining business Peerless Precision Engineering (PPE) 11 years ago.
Peerless Precision Engineering is using a platen style tooling arrangement on a Citizen L20 CNC automatic sliding-head lathe, which offers flexibility when compared to a fixed-head machine.
With a secondhand lathe & a few drill spindles to satisfy the beginnings of what would become a steadily growing order book.
His business partner & financial director Mrs Oakley would rebar the lathe, check parts & input any offsets.
he would also operate the drill spindles for second operation work, remove burrs, pack up work for despatch & attend to all the paperwork.
For two years this working regime was rewarded as they progressively established the business.
PPE now employs a further seven people & has nine of the latest turn-mill centres including two Citizen CNC sliding head lathes.
In April 2008, the company moved into a 6,000ft2 machine shop adjacent to the original factory in Goathurst near Bridgwater, Somerset.
Bargery still looks back fondly to those tough, early days having been persuaded by Mrs Oakley to use up his previous 30 years of subcontract machining & business skills to set up PPE.
As the company grew, investment strategy followed that of a genuine ‘turning specialist’ & an early favouritism for fixed-head lathes.
Frequently, parts would be turned then either five of them would be loading drill jigs, spending hours in front of pillar drills & then moving over to the bench to remove the burrs they had created.
However, lots of of the parts produced were under 20mm diameter & often it was felt there had to be a better way of machining by combining second operation turning & drilling cycles.
The solution was a fixed-head lathe with subspindle & driven tools that decimated both the manufacturing lead time & machining time.
Then a contract for a batch of 2,500 parts brought forward the day for decisive thinking.
Then, in 2001, Bargery came across sliding head technology that led to an investigation of the machines & their suppliers, & an evaluation of the level of technical complexity & promises of support.
As a result, all the boxes were ticked by NC Engineering of Watford, now Citizen Machinery UK, that led to the installation of a Citizen L20.
This is confirmed by today’s installations of five Citizen L20s, a C16 & K16, the latter installed in 2007, & all are working round-the-clock.
Bargery said: ‘With the Citizen’s faster & shorter axis movements & overlapping, they are able to take 60 per-cent out of the cycle time of the fixed-head lathe process.’ he commented further how high standards of quality, & consistency of size & finish has never drawn any concern leading to PPE becoming a dedicated Citizen user for up to 20mm components in materials such as mild steel, 606-M36T, 303 stainless & silver steel.
‘The reason for continuous Citizen purchases is that Citizen Machinery has been true to its word with support,’ said Bargery.
‘As an extension to normal machine training, Citizen sent applications specialist Phil Francis to help enhance the single cycle “one-hit” methods & set ups.’ To date the Citizens have produced some 130 different parts up to 75mm long, mostly covered by repeat orders & all cycle times vary between 20 seconds to five minutes.
‘Tolerances have never been a problem, even when holding 10 microns size on batches of silver steel components that are run continuously through night & day,’ added Bargery.
Most general tolerances present no challenge between + 0.1mm & + 0.05mm with surface finishes typically 1.6 micron CLA.
However, Bargery will always ‘throttle-back’ speeds & feeds on all his machines preferring to extend gizmo life & ensure production consistency, which also helps the complete system to run smoothly.
As part of the machine package, PPE has added Citizen’s CNC Wizard programming application with wireless transfer & is able, through Delcam’s Featurecam, to share cutting data from its materials library.
Production, scheduling & program information is via Jobshop shopfloor data collection, while MRP & scheduling can all be accessed remotely whenever Bargery is away from the works.