Following the sale from its stand at MACH 2018, Master Abrasives has recently installed a Micromatic eco 200 grinding machine at the Border Ballistics Technologies (BBT) facility in Newcastleton (in the Scottish Borders).

Paul Batson, managing director of Master Abrasives (www.master-abrasives.co.uk), said: “Geoffrey Kolbe from BBT was one of the hundreds of visitors we welcomed onto our stand to view the eco 200 grinding machine, and making this sale was one of the highlights of the show.”

Mr Kolbe has been in the non-military gun trade for over 25 years, and he established BBT in 2015 to fill a gap in the UK market.

It manufactures high-performance gunsmith tooling such as chamber reamers, headspace gauges and other specialist tooling, all produced to high standards of accuracy and with a high-quality finish.

He said: “We saw that taking basic blank preparation operations off our tool and cutter grinder by introducing a manual/semi-automatic hydraulic cylindrical grinding machine would increase our production output.

“The Micromatic eco 200 from Master Abrasives proved to be the ideal machine for this purpose.

“The production of special-purpose bespoke stepped reamers and head space gauges in tool steel demands very tight tolerances on specific dimensional features such as outer diameter, angles and faces.

“The eco 200 fulfilled our requirements perfectly.”