Since installing a Jones & Shipman 524 Easy surface grinder, Lincoln-based Micrometric Ltd — a specialist in small laser-cut components — has been able to broaden its horizons in terms of component-manufacturing capability while greatly improving its customer response times.
Micrometric had previously relied on sub-contractors for its grinding operations, but changes at its supplier — plus an increasing volume of components needing ground profiles and surfaces — prompted the company to invest in its own grinding machine. Managing director Neil Main says: “Grinding was not a technique we had first hand experience of, but one of our production engineering team had worked in a grinding environment and suggested Jones & Shipman as a start point. We approached them and received a solution that meant we did not look any further.
“The common denominator throughout our customer base is the small size of our components. It’s where we started — in 1982 — and we are now one of about half a dozen UK companies specialising in the development and manufacture of small and micro components.”
This size is reflected in the choice of the J&S grinder from Leicester-based Jones & Shipman Hardinge Ltd
(www.jonesshipman.com). The machine has a grinding bed capacity of 500 x 200mm; it also features the J&S-developed Easy programming software. “Production runs can be anything from 10 to 10,000, but 250 is an average batch size, which is well within the machine’s capacity.
More important is the fact that the range of parts we manufacture is vast. We store the programs on an adjacent PC, and our operators can rapidly call them off when a batch — or even a single item — is required. With the Easy software, this is proving to be a simple, reliable and repeatable operation.”
The Easy touch-screen control, which offers the operator the benefits of CNC without the complexity of a traditional CNC system, features icon-based software that can inter-polate two axes simultaneously to allow the production of complex shapes, angles, pro-files and surfaces. At start up, the operator is offered a choice of three modes — manual, dress or grind. Having made his choice, a range of options is automatically presented, allowing production to start in the shortest possible time.