Tranquil PC – a specialist in rugged, fan-less computers – was started on the kitchen table of its founder David Thompson, with the company outsourcing and offshoring all of its chassis machining to suppliers in China. However, as the business grew, the logistics of shipping from China, and the associated risks of products being copied, saw the decision taken to bring the majority of machining back to the UK and, more specifically, in-house. The company chose XYZ Machine Tools as its supplier for vertical machining centre capacity.

“Our first move was to purchase an XYZ Mini Mill 560, initially for R&D work,” says director Phillip Thompson. “That machine was soon working to capacity seven days a week, not only on R&D, but also production. To ease the workload, we added two XYZ 710 vertical machining centres to create our first machining cell.”
Thompson admits, at the time, no one at the company was a “seasoned machinist or programmer”, but the machines provided a good introduction thanks to the intuitive nature of the Siemens control systems and the level of support from XYZ Machine Tools.
This support was integral to the next phase of investment, which saw an additional XYZ 710 VMC and another Mini Mill 560 installed to meet demand. With these machines in place and running five days a week, eight hours a day, Tranquil PC wanted to complete its second cell, choosing an XYZ 750 LR (linear rail) machining centre equipped with advanced Renishaw probing technology.
“In-house machining has definitely been a driver of our growth, and now that Tranquil PC is part of the French IT group 2CRSI, we have significant plans for further investment,” says Thompson.
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