The machine list, and what it means.

Three simultaneous five-axis machining centres, all with 600 × 500 × 450 mm travels, 12,000 rpm spindles, through-spindle coolant at 70 bar and Renishaw probing on the table. High-pressure through-spindle coolant is the specification worth understanding on that list: it is what lets a cutter clear its own chips out of a deep pocket in titanium instead of re-cutting them, and re-cutting chips is what destroys tools and surface finish on exactly the work you would come to us for. Two submerged wire EDM machines with automatic threading, which is the feature that lets a long profile run through the night with nobody in the building — about a third of our wire hours are unattended. A CNC turning centre with driven tooling and a bar feeder for shafts, spindles and anything else that starts round. And the room that decides whether any of the rest is worth anything: a Zeiss bridge CMM in an inspection room held at 20°C ±1°C. Temperature control is not a luxury and it is the thing most shops skip. Aluminium expands roughly 0.023 mm per metre per degree; measure a 200 mm part in an unheated Sheffield workshop in February, call the answer five microns, and you are reporting a number you did not measure. Every gauge in the building is calibrated on a schedule with certificates traceable to national standards, and the calibration records are open to any customer who audits us.

We machine, we inspect, and we are honest about the rest. Anodising, hard anodising, passivation, chemical conversion, black oxide, zinc-nickel, shot peening and NDT all go to approved subcontractors we have used for years, and every one of them holds the approvals your drawing calls for — Nadcap where aerospace demands it. Heat treatment is subcontracted the same way, with the parts going out and coming back through our own goods-in so the traceability is unbroken. We tell you which operations we subcontract before you place an order rather than after you discover it, and we never subcontract machining itself without your written agreement. In practice that means a plated or anodised part carries two to five working days on top of the machining lead time, and we build that into the quoted date rather than quoting the machining and surprising you later. Grinding is the one capability we do not have in-house and consciously have not bought: if your drawing calls for a ground finish tighter than we will commit to, we would rather send you to a specialist grinder we trust than buy a machine and learn on your parts. We will give you their name.