Specialising in milling and turning, Bedford-based Wickham Engineering Ltd was set up in 1998 by husband-and-wife team Craig and Heather Wickham. Since then, the business has bought an adjacent unit that has doubled its floor space to 2,500ft
2A former tool maker with Vauxhall Motors in Luton, managing director Craig Wickham defines the sub-contract company’s key strengths as its flexibility and focus on prototype and batch work for a diverse range of industry sectors. “Our expertise extends to light assembly work; we can also source welding, fabrication and custom finishes such as plating, anodising and spray painting. This enables us to offer a complete service to our customers.”
The latest investment made by the nine-strong company is a 20hp 5,000rev/min XYZ Compact Turn 52 turning centre from Burlescombe-based XYZ Machine Tools Ltd (www.xyzmachinetools.com). This machine is equipped with a Siemens 828D ShopTurn CNC, which features a host of canned cycles — such as residual material recognition — that make shopfloor programming fast and simple, with the minimum of key-strokes and maximum re-assurance to the operator. Once written, completed programs can be checked using graphical simulation, with the finished component displayed on-screen as a 2-D or 3-D image.
The Compact Turn 52 is the fourth full-CNC machine supplied to Wickham Engineering by XYZ Machine Tools. It has a maximum turning diameter of 220mm, a bar capacity of 52mm and a footprint of just 2.53 x 1.45m. In fact, the purchase of the company’s first XYZ CNC machine — a 9hp 8,000rev/min Mini Mill 450 vertical machining centre in June 2006 — was also influenced by the need to make the best possible use of available floor space; that machine has a footprint of 1.6 x 1.8m.
Shopfloor programming
All four XYZ machines — the other two are a larger 15hp 8,000rev/min Mini Mill 560 and a 20hp 8,000rev/min 710 VMC (with 12- and 24-tool magazines respectively) — are routinely programmed on the shopfloor by Gavin and Daniel, both of whom completed their engineering apprenticeships with Wickham Engineering. Craig Wickham, too, is still very much hands-on as far as machining is concerned, and the company’s combined expertise covers the manual and CNC machining of a wide variety of materials, including brass, aluminium, plastics, stainless steels and titanium. As well as working from conventional drawings or even sketches, Wickham Engineering can accept various data inputs, including PDF, DWG and TIF formatted files.
Heather Wickham says: “We are happy with the current size of the company, because Craig likes to keep on top of things and really enjoys contributing to a customer’s development process. Providing high-quality work and good service at a competitive price means customers keep coming back to us. Similarly, we have kept faith with XYZ because they show the same commitment to their customers. Our investment programme is to a large extent driven by the volume and mix of work coming in, but our choice of machine reflects the fact that we have not experienced any problems with any of our four XYZ CNC machines.”