Specialist turned parts manufacturer C&M Precision was established in Maldon Essex in 1992 and now has a turnover of more than £1.4m.  A large proportion of turned part sales has been exported - predominantly for the telecommunications and micro-electronic industries. Says John Cable, C&M’s Managing Director: "One of our American customers is a big player, the 11th largest company in the world with a turnover of $40 billion."

C&M has completed a wave-guide component contract via another leading household name in the American telecoms business. This was machined featuring milled pockets and tapped holes in the side. It also had scalloped shapes at one end and drilled holes as well as drilled and tapped holes on a pitch circle diameter. He says: "They had to be perfect, without a scratch or imperfection because that could cause reflection and result in crossed lines."

Having started with a single CNC fixed headstock lathe, of which the company now has four, it quickly gained a reputation for timely delivery of very high quality components.

Just eight people work for C&M, all of whom are highly skilled and focus on setting the machines during the day. They operate a split/overlapping shift system, from 6 o'clock in the morning until 5 p.m. at night, with two people coming in at lunchtime and working through to midnight. But from midnight until the start of the next shift, the lathes are run totally unmanned.

An important benefit of employing skilled staff comes from maintaining the level of quality required as John Cable explains: "We have a first-off inspection but don't operate a final inspection department, that's too late. There is no point in finding out that the parts are wrong when you have made boxes of them. So, we have a continual process of inspection, all our skilled people continuously oversee the quality throughout the production process." The Company was first registered, by B.S.I., to ISO 9002 in 1996 and achieved ISO 9001:2000 during 2002.

From its base of about 20 companies, around a third are very frequent customers. Some are long standing, as John Cable says: "We have been machining the outside case for a Geiger counter probe for one company, in batches of between 50 and 500, for 10 years. They are really high quality anodised aluminium."

Another customer in South America wanted edge filter components 4.8 mm diameter by 32 mm long for a fuel pump system. Most of the length of the part has a 10 micron tolerance, and it has six slots up the sides of which three face one direction and three the other; worse still, each 'fin' has a subtle difference in diameter so that when installed in the fuel line, it allows fuel to flow over the gap and down the line.

Recently featured on Tomorrow's World Awards, Chelmsford based Minibreather's scuba diving aqualung broke a tradition of breathing apparatus design spanning some half a century. Such is the significance of Minibreather's design, that it is reckoned to cost a third of the price of existing equipment. It has even found a place within the British Science Museum, and, on a commercial footing, has been endorsed by the professional Association of Diving Instructors for use in its training schools, which involve some 80,000 centres around the world.

C&M quoted the diving equipment maker and won the contract to produce the complex air manifold which connects all the flexible piping from the air tank, regulator and gauge of the aqualung. And, such is the importance of the contract, that it could lead to C&M producing upwards of 300,000 of these components a year.

“Our experienced team allows us to make the most of the bank of machines we have and our very low level of rejects demonstrates how important it is to buy critical machines very carefully," John concludes.