With electricity bills, raw material costs and company taxes at record highs, SME manufacturers like 13-person subcontract turn-milling subcontractor C&M Precision are looking to technology to help it maintain profitability.

That is why the firm’s owner and managing director, John Cable, continues to buy Japanese-built lathes from Citizen Machinery UK. Modern versions have proprietary LFV (low frequency vibration) chip-breaking software in the operating system of the controls, helping to maximise a manufacturer’s earnings by ensuring the reliable production of added-value components, while reducing scrap rates to virtually zero.

“We were an early adopter of this technology, buying our first L20-VIIILFV Cincom sliding-head lathe in 2017, the first year the function was available on Citizen turn-mill centres in Europe,” says Cable. “I would never buy another lathe without LFV. We only source machines from Citizen and nearly half of our 13 lathes on the shop floor have the chip-breaking functionality: five Cincoms and a fixed-head Miyano.”

Four of the lathes arrived in the past two years, representing an investment of nearly £750,000 and indicating Cable’s desire to maximise C&M’s use of the technology at its modern production facility in Maldon, Essex. 

The most recent Citizen Cincom to be delivered, in June 2025, was a Cincom L32-XIILFV sliding-head lathe of nominal 32 mm bar capacity, with B-axis live tool carrier and long parts collection unit. The B-axis option on these machines is essential for milling an angled flat on a titanium ball joint, a feature that is impossible to realise on other Citizen lathes at C&M and would otherwise necessitate a second operation.

More information www.citizenmachinery.co.uk