Described, not photographed.

A structural bracket in Ti-6Al-4V for an aerospace tier two, 240 off a year on call-off. The difficulty was never the tolerance — it was that the part is thin-walled and wanted to move as the stress came out of the billet. We machine it in two stages with a stress-relief between, and Tom made a vacuum fixture that holds it on the finished face rather than clamping across the web. Scrap rate over four years is under 1%. An instrument body in 316 stainless for a surgical device OEM, batches of 400. Here the tolerance genuinely was the difficulty: a 24 mm H7 bore concentric to the outside diameter within 0.008 mm, on a part that gets handled a lot. The answer was to finish-bore and turn the outside in the same set-up so the two features never see a re-fixture, plus in-process gauging every tenth part. That job is the one the Spec Diagram on this site is drawn from. And an upright for a motorsport damper start-up who arrived with a hand sketch and a budget that would not stretch to what they had drawn. Ruth quoted it, then told them which three dimensions were driving about 70% of the cost and why — two were tolerances tighter than the function needed and one was a radius that forced a smaller cutter and four times the cycle time. They changed two of the three and the part came in at £310 instead of £680. We would rather have that conversation and win the work than quote the drawing as-is and lose it on price to somebody who will not read it.

Almost everything we make belongs to somebody else. A structural bracket tells a competitor what an airframe is doing; an instrument body tells them what a device is for; a set of dampers tells them which team is running which geometry next season. So we do not photograph customer parts for our own marketing, we do not put logos in a client wall, and we do not name the customers in the three jobs described above even though two of them would probably say yes if we asked. A supplier who will show you somebody else’s part is a supplier who will show somebody else yours. What we will do instead is talk in specifics about the work in general terms — 411 distinct part numbers ran through the shop in 2025, roughly 40% aerospace, 30% medical device, 20% general industrial and 10% motorsport; batch sizes from one to five thousand; and materials weighted heavily towards stainless, titanium and nickel alloys. And if you want a reference, ask: we will put you in touch with a customer in your sector who has agreed in advance to take the call, which is worth considerably more than a photograph of a shiny part on a black background. If you want to see the work itself, come to Sheffield. There will be parts on the CMM when you arrive, and we will tell you which ones we cannot let you look at closely. That refusal is the most useful thing we can show you about how your own drawing would be handled.