As part of a group with 11 facilities on five continents, Ely-based Thorlabs UK designs and manufactures an extensive range of photonics products, including solid-aluminium optical mounting boards, stainless-steel honeycomb ‘breadboards’ and photonics tables for the scientific, medical research and academic sectors.
In 2010, the company purchased a Grindingmaster Timesavers 42-series 1350 B machine for deburring, edge radiusing and finishing from Ellesco (
www.ellesco.co.uk).
This immediately released several staff from manually finishing the tables. Materials and process engineer Richard Shaw says: “That machine made a huge impact on our throughput, efficiency and costs. In addition to the redeployment of staff, the consumable cost for manual finishing was eliminated.
Taking into account the cost of the machine’s rotary brushes and the amount of work that they do each week, the machine had a payback period of 1.4 years.”
The company has now taken delivery of a second Grindingmaster machine — the UK’s first Timesavers 42-series 1000 RB — which is dedicated to finishing aluminium-based products.
It has two rotary brushes instead of eight yet still delivers the same consistent non-gloss surface finish. “The latest addition is a smaller machine with a compact footprint, specified for a range of aluminium mounting boards that will never exceed the 1m width capacity of the machine.
Our original Timesavers machine is now dedicated to stainless-steel ‘breadboards’ and photonics tables, so we have eliminated the need for change-overs.
We now have the capacity to meet future production demands, and we can maintain the excellent surface finishes and consistency that customers have come to expect from our market-leading product lines.”