For over 30 years, Huddersfield-based JAW Engineering has provided local industry with low-volume subcontract machining capacity and emergency breakdown support. Up until now, all its machining had been carried out on manual machines, reliant on highly skilled operators, including company founder John White. Now, with John’s son Stuart taking on management of the family business, the time was right to look to the future and move to CNC.

With Stuart White’s lack of experience in CNC he turned to a long-standing customer for advice, and was invited in to see first-hand, and talk with operators about their XYZ ProtoTrak-controlled machines. “The opportunity to chat with guys on the shop floor was fascinating as not one of them had a bad word to say about XYZ. Furthermore, seeing the ProtoTrak control in action convinced me that it was the best solution to take us from manual to CNC machining.”
Encouraged by what he saw and heard, White paid a visit to XYZ Machine Tools showroom in Sheffield for a demonstration and made the decision to purchase an SLX 425 ProTurn lathe.
By introducing CNC in the form of the ProtoTrak control, White is looking to future-proof the business, as finding skilled manual machine operators is not easy. Here, the ProtoTrak’s conversational interface makes the job of programming complex parts straightforward.
“The addition of CNC is allowing us to do more complex work than we could previously,” says White. “Moreover, we are more efficient as the control speeds up operations that manually would take much longer, such as screw cutting. Repeatability is taken for granted, and by storing the programs we can quickly repeat parts as and when they are required.”
For further information www.xyzmachinetools.com