Tom Pearce started his own business, CIRC Manufacturing in Westbury, Wiltshire in 2016. Current CNC capacity at the company includes a vertical machining centre and two fixed-head lathes, all pre-owned, and three Citizen Cincom sliding-head lathes also purchased second-hand due to financial constraints during the start-up phase. His stated aim is to gravitate towards using more of the latter machines to produce complex, small to medium diameter, high added value components.

In 2019 Pearce bought a 1995-built Cincom L20-VII slider with a 3 m bar magazine sight-unseen for £4000 from a website and used his engineering skills to refurbish it himself. He did not feel sufficiently confident to commission it, so asked Citizen Machinery UK to align the bar feeder, bolt down the machine and check the axis movements. The company was very receptive and promptly sent in an engineer to complete the work.

A year later, Pearce again approached Citizen Machinery UK directly for a machine with C-axis spindles and higher speed driven tooling. The supplier offered a K16E-VII built in 2011, a 16 mm capacity slider that ticked the right boxes and is one of the fastest lathes that Citizen has ever manufactured.

A copper contact pin, a development part that was previously produced on the L20-VII, saw the cycle time fall threefold from 60 to 20 seconds using the K16E-VII. The contract has since expanded and the subcontractor is now producing a family of pins in long runs for a customer in the electrical industry.

In January 2022 Pearce bought a two-year-old Citizen Cincom L20-VIIILFV, again on the open market, and achieved another step change in productivity. The first job put on the machine was the production of 20,000 stainless steel gland nuts of 22.22 mm diameter for an electrical equipment manufacturer.
For further information www.citizenmachinery.co.uk

Amorphology, a NASA spin-off company, specialises in the application of advanced materials and manufacturing technologies for the improvement of non-lubricated micro-gears for robotics and other industrial applications. These materials have advanced features over steel, titanium and aluminium, for example.

Amorphous metals are a non-crystalline class of alloy that cut and chip differently than other materials and, in the company’s quest to source a machine that could produce the micro-gears, it conducted machining tests with several machine suppliers – including Starrag – to assess the precision, cycle times and overall capabilities of the machines as they cut a relatively unknown alloy.

“We were focused on finding the best machine to meet our rapid prototyping, mould insert cutting and post-processing needs,” says Amorphology’s COO Jason Riley. “The Starrag Bumotec s191H turn-mill centre outperformed all contenders.”

After receiving CAD files of the prototype micro-gears and undertaking tests using a Starrag-developed cutting tool at the machine tool builder’s sites in Switzerland and the USA, several batches of samples were produced. Amorphology was impressed with the results and, in discussions with Starrag about how both companies could co-operate to grow their respective businesses, it was agreed that Amorphology would showcase the Bumotec in its Pasadena (California) site for the customers of both companies to view.

Amorphology is set to make a wide variety of parts on the machine, from mould inserts to prototype gears, as well as other production bulk metallic glasses and traditional metal parts.

“We are targeting high-precision parts with tolerances of often around ±5 µm on certain dimensions,” says Riley. “Most of our work is focused on rapid prototyping and batch production quantities in the region of hundreds of parts per month.”
For further information www.starrag.com