Delivering a balanced machining portfolio that matches present and predicted workflows is the current investment policy of A Fawcett Precision Engineers. This ethos at the Elland, West Yorkshire company gained fresh impetus when Joanne Thompson took over the running of the company following her father’s retirement in 2009.

“We had a wide range of lathes when I took over the business, but all of them were manual and many were getting old and creating bottlenecks in production,” she says. “To address this, in 2012 we bought a second-hand CNC lathe, along with a new SLX 555 ProTurn lathe from XYZ Machine Tools. And, while the XYZ SLX 555 is still with us and working well, the old CNC lathe had seen better days and needed replacing.”
As a result, March 2019 saw the arrival of a new XYZ TC400 turning centre with Siemens 828D ShopTurn control. The machine has a maximum swing of 600 mm and is the largest turning centre in the XYZ range.
During the summer, following Thompson’s participation and graduation from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme, the incentive and confidence was there for more investment, resulting in a further order being placed with XYZ Machine Tools. The company ordered the latest ProTurn lathe, an RLX425 with RX ProtoTrak control, which was delivered in July.
“You have to be realistic and confident about what you can do for customers and not promise something you can’t deliver, which is why we’ve continued to focus on low-to-medium batch quantities in sectors where we have extensive experience,” says Thompson. “The XYZ machines meet our needs perfectly for this type of work. Having the machines has made us more cost-effective, reduced our labour costs and helped us become more competitive.”
For further information www.xyzmachinetools.com