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Precision turned parts made by C and M Precision using sliding head technology

Story added 26 January 2010.

You will rarely find John Cable, managing director of precision turned parts specialist C and M Precision in the front office – 90 per cent of his day is spent setting machines, planning new jobs, improving production cycles on existing contract components or overseeing the quality of work produced from the four Citizen top of the range M-Series sliding head turn-mill centres, two larger capacity twin turret turn-mill centres and a pair of two-axis lathes.  

“Production machining fascinates me,” he maintains, “and I just never want to let go!” This draws eyes to the heavens from his long serving production manager Craig Walling as Mr Cable adds: “There is nothing wrong with striving to achieve perfection which has kept very many loyal customers from the early days back in 1992.” At that time when he set up the Maldon, Essex, based business, he was just 24, became mortgaged to the hilt to invest in the company and was very determined to succeed in doing things his way.  

Picking from a cabinet of treasured samples, Mr Cable recounts how progression from separate operations into single cycle turn-milling has enabled him to achieve very high levels of precision on very complicated components.  He said: “It is viable if you very carefully the right machinery, tooling and have people with the attitude and willingness to make it work.  We treat the machining of a simple washer in batches of several thousand with the same dedication as a small batch of high pressure, quick-release hydraulic connectors that require a multitude of driven tool positions.”

Being innovative and finding better ways of producing parts has enabled C & M Precision to build sales to over £1.5 million and constantly improve margins.  He describes how developing a gang tool method of holding air driven spindles on his first two-axis lathe to produce 75,000 parts a month for a metering customer eventually led him into sliding head technology.  “We persuaded a service manager from the lathe supplier to alter the control and create a subroutine.   We immediately slashed the overall floor-to-floor times for producing the parts by 75 per cent by being able to switch from a series of dedicated operations on manual drills and milling machines to just two operations.”

With an expanding order book for small turned parts and an export contract for 200,000 components, Mr Cable decided sliding head technology and single cycle machining was the way forward.  Unfortunately the quality of build of the first three machines installed and growing problems with reliability left a sour taste leading to him going along to the MACH exhibition. However, from his tour of the show this resulted in the growth of a very close relationship with NC Engineering, now Citizen Machinery UK.  Very quickly the three original sliding heads were disposed of and replaced with a Citizen M12 quickly followed by an M16 and later two of the top-of-the-range, 14-axis M32-Vs being installed at the 4,100 ft² machine shop in Maldon.  

Said Mr Cable: “It was a breath of fresh air with the level of support for these machines coupled with greater reliability and higher productivity.  As a result, the two Citizens gave the same output as three of the previous machines!  As a production machine shop – that is what our business is all about.”

Due to the type of work and Mr Cable’s production led philosophy he relies on a high machine specification to help achieve his aims.  Each of the Citizen’s M32-V’s has IEMCA bar feed, special swarf extraction capable of handling chips and stringy swarf, Citizen’s fully programmable automated gantry-based unloading system for component removal from the subspindle and conveyoring from the working zone.  The 2,000 psi high pressure CoolBlaster coolant system is installed on each machine as well as a high quality fume extraction system.  

The high pressure CoolBlaster is viewed by Mr Cable as essential and very rewarding for the continuous rate of production his machines are run at.  “We often have to produce deep holes and the programmable coolant feed ensures the cycles are consistent, tools perform at their optimum and swarf is well controlled.  For instance, on one regular brass component 145 mm long we have to drill a 14 mm hole from solid on the M32-V.  Due to CoolBlaster we can hit this with just one peck in eight seconds,” he said “and we have the confidence to do this operation completely unmanned.”

C & M Precision has six machinists to look after the eight machines over two shifts 6 am - 2 pm and 2 pm - midnight, with 2pm to 5pm being overlapped.  The rest of the time these machines are run unmanned which confirms the level of confidence in the processes and the ability to predict areas such as strategic tool changes for minimising interruptions.  By incorporating the gantry unload, this reduces coolant loss from ‘drag-over’, swarf contamination of components and eliminates any potential damage.  As Mr Cable adds: “Unloading costs us nothing as it is overlapped with the main and subspindle operations so we make further gains on output.”

The same attitude is applied to tooling.  He insists tools are bought for performance and consistency, not price.  “If quality s and you have problems with parts, margins are squeezed and your production planning goes out of the window.   You then start to let other people and yourself down,” he insists.

C & M Precision’s customers span the connector industry from simple plug connectors to very high level electro-mechanical fittings used in the mining industry.  Exquisite brassware components are produced for bathrooms, custom car components are made from phosphor bronze, mild steel and 303 stainless steel which Mr Cable describes as having to be totally ‘blemish-free’.  “I’m so proud to see these in the despatch department,” he said.  His company has produced parts for the aerospace industry in 316 stainless steel just 8 mm diameter by 8.5 mm long requiring 13 tools and has had a very long-serving customer of over eight years taking special manifolds for use by scuba divers.

The contract for the award-winning Minibreather was won on the back of the original Citizen M12 to which Mr Cable then added the Citizen M16 but with an 18 mm oversize bar capacity.  These were then followed with the two M32-V machines.  “The M32-Vs with two Y-axis crossfeeds give such outstanding flexibility for optimising a cycle time by overlapping tools and cutting with three tools simultaneously,” he said.  He then describes how in the early days of the contract they were able to cut cycle times by half by milling two large flats simultaneously with each Y-axis and combine drilling or turning.  

So successful was the Minibreather for its inventor that it also reflected back to C & M Precision, to create new business opportunities.  The developer was approached by a long distance truck driver who had bad experiences from delays and a fire in the almost endless lengths of some European tunnels.  The result was a compact, portable 200 bar compressed air supply device that could be kept in the cab of the truck and used simultaneously by two people should there ever be a problem.  

Production of the complex valve and control device, as with Minibreather, was scheduled for the Citizens of C & M Precision and the product is currently being evaluated for providing short term respiratory protection to people having to gain access into dusty or smoke-filled environments.  

At the other end of the scale, the Citizen sliding head turn-mill centres have provided a miniature service for the 2 mm Scale Association producing batches of up to 4,000, 9 mm diameter by 1.3 mm thick model train wheels and axles just 1 mm diameter.  The modelling scale of 2mm:1ft (9.42 gauge) has a long history as the smallest practical fine scale model standard with a band of dedicated enthusiasts.  

For the future Mr Cable has achieved the desire of many subcontract operations by developing, producing and selling an own product using his own skills and in-house capacity.  Selling direct through the internet he produces and assembles a whole family of hand-held, pocket-sized to electric-powered herb and spice grinders.  Here, he maintains, the multi-axis interpolation capabilities of the Citizen M-Series machines enable the different configurations of mating fine cutting edges, that chop and pulverise the different herbs, to be precisely milled in-cycle to totally finished dimensions.  

The product range, he maintains: “Fills a gap in the market, uses our ingenuity and encompasses the flexibility of the Citizen machines to turn, mill, drill, thread and bore a whole series of quite complicated components in whatever batch size we need.  The parts are all demanding with very close tolerances and require highly presentable surface finishes that we now sell direct to all corners of the world.”
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