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On the back of a record year in 2011 with boosted contracts from existing customers and added business from new companies, including a £400,000 a year machining and assembly contract won from an existing overseas supplier, Unicut Precision is gearing up for 2012 with new turn-mill centre and sliding head lathe orders worth some £650,000. In addition, the Welwyn Garden City precision turned parts subcontractor has laid down budgets to install an additional fully programmable component cleaning centre and a soluble coolant recycling facility.
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With subcontract assembly services and supplier partnership orientated orders helping to exceed peak levels of business achieved in 2008, Unicut Precision has invested over £200,000 on an additional top-of-the-range Citizen M32-V CNC sliding head turn-mill centre.
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Welwyn Garden City based Unicut Precision has won a long term vendor managed inventory agreement for producing 45 different high precision shafts for use in flow control devices. Due to the company’s development of a dedicated cell around a Citizen M20 CNC sliding head turn-mill centre, Unicut is now able to produce up to six totally different component types, depending on batch size, in a single day, on the one machine.
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A major investment by Unicut Precision in single cycle turn-mill technology is providing fully automatic changeover for many of the 46 components in a made-to-order family of parts contract that has created a true around-the-clock unmanned production capability.
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Unicut Precision has won a long term contract to supply complete sub-assemblies including final test at a rate of 50/day for the defence industry. The assembly comprises 27 components, of which eight high tolerance parts are machined on its Citizen CNC sliding head and Miyano fixed head turn-mill centres.
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Such was the success of Unicut Precision’s presence at the BTMA Village in Hall 5 at MACH 2010, that within two weeks of the show the company had secured a key export order with further contracts under negotiation for producing high tolerance hydraulic components for a leading Indian company.
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Twenty-two visitors to the Unicut Precision stand in the BTMA village at MACH 2010 each walked away with a bottle of champagne for successfully putting a golf ball around an obstacle course the company had devised on its stand made from samples of precision components produced at the Welwyn Garden City machine shop.
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A £700,000, two-year contract to supply 31 different components has been won by Unicut Precision of Welwyn Garden City that will involve the company in agreed vendor managed stocking techniques in order to meet three-day ‘delivery to line’ demands.
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Unicut Precision has broken into the subsea sector by winning an important contract for a range of 17 specialist connectors for undersea use including “Banana” components destined for sensor assemblies and maintenance tooling.
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Building a clean room in the production area of the Welwyn Garden City facility has paid dividends for Unicut Precision as it was a key element in securing a contract to initially supply 5,000 assemblies a year for direct to line delivery at the customer. The contract, which involves the machining of 11 components, also includes 10 bought-in items and special processes, test and packaging.
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Following some three years of extensive prototype development with the customer on needleless drug administration technology, that enables precisely measured shots of insulin to pass through the pores of the skin, Unicut Precision of Welwyn Garden City has been awarded a prestigious contract from a Dutch company to produce an initial 10,000 sets of the 12 part assembly worth more than £230,000.
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As part of the expansion of its production facilities at Welwyn Garden City, which now incorporates sub assembly to complement its machining capability involving high precision components, Unicut Precision has established a clean room area within the shopfloor.
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An 11 part pneumatic valve component involving complete kit supply has been won by Unicut Precision of Welwyn Garden City and has pulled components away from subcontractors’ schedules in Eastern Europe. The initial year contract will involve batches of parts from 400 to 12,000 and will include Unicut providing finishing processes such as protective coatings.
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Unicut Precision has won an 80,000 a year trim, instrument and switchgear export contract for a European supercar that will involve ultra-high precision turning, contouring, cross hole drilling, grooving, slotting and broaching as well as deep fine hole drilling, form milling and full in-cycle deburring in single operational cycles.
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A major export contract for aerospace components has been renewed with Unicut Precision of Welwyn Garden City by a US customer requesting delivery schedules originally due early in 2009 to be brought forward due to increased demand.
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A special hydraulic valve body contract has been won by Unicut Precision for repeat batches of 2,000 complex multi-featured components due to the company’s capability to re-engineer the production process from an aluminium casting requiring five or six operations into a single turn-mill cycle out of bar.
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Subcontract machining specialist Unicut precision has invested £130,000 in a fully automated swarf handling and coolant filtration system for its new bay at the 18,000 ft2 small turned parts production facility at Welwyn Garden City. The installation, part of a £725,000 investment programme that will include purchase of six new CNC controlled turn-mill centres over the next two years and create four additional jobs, was grant funded by the East of England Development Agency (EEDA).
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Companies, especially those that have been investing in the latest equipment, are facing ever greater problems trying to find the skills or develop existing people in order to gain the highest productivity returns from their costly investment programme.
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The first international order for the world’s fastest 32 mm capacity CNC sliding head auto was placed on Citizen Machinery UK by Unicut Precision of Welwyn Garden City during the MACH 2008 exhibition at the NEC.
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Unicut Precision has expanded its multi-axis CNC small parts machining premises by almost 40 per cent to bring the machine shop area to over 18,000 ft². Within the new area two of the latest Citizen K-16 CNC sliding head autos, ordered during the EMO exhibition in Hannover in September, have been installed alongside a pair of K-16 machines that were commissioned earlier in 2007.
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Responding to increases in export contracts from America and rising orders from the medical sector for high quality components in difficult to machine materials, Unicut Precision took the opportunity to order two of the latest Citizen K16-VI CNC sliding headstock automatic lathes from the Citizen exhibition stand at the European machine tool exhibition, EMO 2007 in Hannover.
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Unicut Precision was host to a delegation from Citizen Machinery in Japan, the USA and Europe, to see first hand how the precision subcontractor was taking full advantage of its 14 Citizen CNC sliding head automatic lathes. Also as part of the visit, they were keen to listen to views and opinions in relation to future machine development that could be of benefit to further increase productivity on the type of work being produced at the Welwyn Garden City company.
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Unicut Precision has installed three additional Citizen CNC sliding head automatic lathes at its Welwyn Garden City facility and recruited three additional machine setters to meet a 25 per cent increase on its current order book. Says Jason Nicholson, joint managing director: “We came into 2007 with the biggest contract order book ever and still have quotations awaiting purchase decisions from UK and overseas customers.”
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A fully automated tool dispensing system linked to its management information network that will track tool usage against jobs and automatically initiate re-order as stocks are used, has been installed in Unicut Precision’s Welwyn Garden City subcontract machine shop.
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In order to speed first-off inspection, monitoring of production and to automatically collate inspection reports and statistical process data, Unicut Precision has ordered an OGP SmartScope Flash 200 fully integrated touch probe and non-contact video 3-D inspection centre for its Welwyn Garden City subcontract machining operation.
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Unicut Precision’s production engineering culture of implementing ‘one-hit’ single machining cycles on very complex components has won it a long-term contract to produce batches of 250 flow control bodies that caused concern even to the supplier of the machines on which the parts would be processed!
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