Subcontractor Unicut Precision has turned three-quarters of its manufacturing capacity over to ventilator component production.
The company is now stranger to producing large quantities of components, shipping a million items to customers in a typical month. The company operates 22 Cincom sliding-head lathes and eight Miyano fixed-head turning centres and an Index MS40 six-spindle bar automatic, in addition to other metalcutting plant.
Three-quarters of this capacity was changed over in early April 2020 to manufacture medical components for the government's Ventilator Challenge UK following a call from a member of the supply chain management team, McLaren, to Unicut's owner Jason Nicholson.
He said, "Drawings started coming in on a Thursday and we quoted straight away. The first orders for a dozen different part numbers were received on the Friday and Saturday and we started producing them immediately. Within a week the workload had increased to 780,000 components across 31 varieties, which we are currently producing 24/7."
Over 80% of this throughput is being machined on lathes supplied by Citizen UK, whose applications engineers helped by providing optimised cycles for producing a couple of the medical components. The remainder of the new parts were programmed on-site by Unicut.
Mr Nicholson continued, "It is testament to the flexibility of modern CNC plant that it can be converted so quickly to produce entirely different components. Only around 2% of a typical year's output from here goes to the medical sector, whereas at the moment it is the vast majority."
Unicut's employees were keen to meet the ventilator challenge and it has not been necessary to furlough any staff, although a few are self-isolating due to underlying health conditions or through having a vulnerable family member at home. Employees willingly worked throughout the whole of the Easter long weekend and discussion is being postponed to a quieter time as to whether the overtime will be paid or added to an individual's annual holiday entitlement.
Social distancing on the shop floor and in the offices is working well, staggered arrival times help to minimise the number of people in any given working area at one time, and the ubiquitous hand sanitising gel can be found hanging from every operator's belt.
Mr Nicholson concluded, "It has been a surreal time, but everyone here is helping out, as they are in machine shops all around the country, to make much-needed ventilator components.
"We have already produced big quantities of the smaller diameter parts, so we have now been able to reallocate many of the Cincom sliders.
"Overall, I estimate that around half of our capacity across the lathes and machining centres is still running around the clock on work for Ventilator Challenge UK and will be for some time to come."