In December 2010, John Thornton and Tim Buckley took full control of Kirkstall Precision, a subcontract machining facility in Leeds, following a management buyout three years earlier.
The company has since expanded the range of work it carries out for the medical, nuclear, aerospace, petrochemical, textile and electronics
industries. It is also benefitting from a higher level of activity on the assembly side of the business, with complete packages of equipment supplied to many of its customers.
The supply of surgical instruments and other high precision medical components accounts for 90% of turnover, according to Mr Thornton, who is now the managing director. The
company is well on the way to achieving ISO13485 2003, the quality management standard for medical devices. Component complexity is increasing all the time, but batch sizes tend to stay the same or decrease, which means that more and more time was being spent repeatedly setting up jobs on conventional machine tools. It was not unusual for a component to visit,
for example, a milling machine, a wire eroder, a 4-axis machining centre and a lathe before it was completed. Since the arrival of two twin spindle, sliding head, multi-axis mill/turning centres from Star, an SR-20RIII in 2009 and an SB-16E a year later, parts that previously needed multiple operations are produced from bar in one operation. Not only is productivity increased, but also
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