GASKELLS MAKE SLIDING HEAD TURNING A FAMILY AFFAIR

When Sue Gaskell was sitting in the maternity hospital having just given birth to a lovely daughter, all around her proud fathers were turning up with cards and flowers. Not so Ian Gaskell, he brought in a box of turned parts and a Swiss file and the two of them sat discussing the trials and tribulations of their recently formed small turned parts business while they were de-pipping and de-burring.

Then Sue chuckles: “Ian’s alarm on his watch went off, I got a kiss on the cheek and a gotta go now, I need to re-bar our Citizen. See you later!” Sure enough about an hour or so later Ian returned but with another box of parts while the two CNC sliding head lathes were left running unmanned in the converted garage at the bottom of their garden.

Until July 2002 NC Precision was just Sue and Ian who lived, ate and slept CNC sliding head lathe turning after they set the company up in July 1999 with just 10,000 (pounds sterling) and a second hand Citizen F10. The machine was bought at a farm auction for a fifth of its value because no one knew what it was and was the start of a now thriving business employing four people. Three Citizen machines now run day and night and a fourth is about to be ordered from NC Engineering of Watford.

Ian knows Citizen machines well having been a production manager at another turned parts company where he started his career as an apprentice in 1980. Sue joined the company from college in 1996 doing temporary work which led Ian to train her to operate and set the numerous Citizen machines at the factory. Indeed, Ian also trained his two other recent employees at the same company who both worked with him as apprentices and were unfortunate enough to be made redundant in July.

“The scenario of the four of us working together has massive benefits for us because we all tackle and think about a job the same way,” he says. He has even developed what he calls ‘Pit Stop Setting’ when three of them work together to re-set the same F10, L20 or M16 machines. Each knows what the other is doing and just like an F1 pit crew have certain tasks which means the machine can often be back in production inside 10 minutes.

The early days were tough and certainly busy with the F10 and a rented carnival float generator until 3-phase electrics could be put in the garage. “Tooling was always a concern because it was expensive,” says Ian, “but to get work we had the advantage of low overheads. We often used the Internet to chase down possible customer targets and spent hours following up on the ‘phone.” But soon the F10 was running 24 hours/day and eventually seven days a week. They even had an alarm clock by the bed to remind them to attend to the machine during the night and sometimes worked four hour shifts of one-on, one-off.

Sue describes how one night Ian returned from the local pub as a request for a quotation and component drawing came out of the fax machine. “We costed the part and faxed back the quote 10 minutes later. The phone rang immediately and the customer said he wanted to come to see us there and then, stayed until the early hours and then gave us the contract.” He is still one of their 31 customers to which Ian adds: “We have never lost a customer. Some only give us, say 200 (pounds sterling) of business a year, but others can be well over 10,000 (pounds sterling) in a month.”

The customer base now spans medical, aircraft, fibre optic, hydraulic, fastener and pressure gauge industries as well as making turned parts for a model steam engine customer. Most of the parts produced are between 0.2 mm and 20 mm diameter and in difficult materials such as nimonics, titanium, stainless and aircraft steels and inconel. Also mild steel, nylon, nylatron, brass and aluminium are turned. Generally tolerances are between 10 to 20 micron. “However, its not uncommon to have to work to five micron,” says Sue and shows a part with a 10 micron tolerance on a 1 mm bore which she checks with their digital microscope.

With the ageing Citizen F10, which is still running around the clock and never falters, they were running out of capacity and decided to go to MACH 2000 at the NEC in Birmingham to look at the sliding head lathes that were available and with the intention to order a Citizen B12 machine. However, Ian reflects how NC Engineering’s Managing Director Geoff Bryant persuaded them to buy the larger and more complex all servo-driven L20 with its 20 tool capacity and secondary spindle.

“That decision was the turning point of our business,” says Ian. “It immediately took us into a different league, attracted new customers and we were surprised how much extra work we then added from existing business.” However, the machine was bigger than the planned B-Series which meant putting a bulge in the garage door to accommodate the bar feed, a step had to be dug out of the floor to accommodate the coolant tank and then the garage rebuilt soon after into a modern clean workshop with a tiled floor.

Two years on from the MACH 2000 exhibition, Sue and Ian’s two Citizens were again full to capacity and they became the talk of MACH 2002 when they spent their honeymoon at the show buying themselves a 140,000 (pounds sterling) wedding present straight off the NC Engineering exhibition stand in the shape of the latest 80 tool, 13-axis Citizen M16.

“But,” says Sue, “inside six months the capacity on this machine is almost full with some forward orders running well into the first quarter of 2003, we are having to go shopping again,” she says. This will also mean a move to a new expanded site.

Ian is full of confidence in the Citizen product. “We always use good quality tooling and work like the Japanese with more concern over consistency of production than out and out cycle time.” He describes one complex multi-feature stainless steel part just completed with a 10 micron bore tolerance. “The M16 ran for three days and nights and we never had to change an offset. We just monitored size and put the bars in,” he says.

The business still dominates the domestic life of the couple. But as Sue admits: “It’s a lot easier now with the four of us in the company. But Ian and I still end up debating in bed how to make a part at 2 am in the morning!”