Unicut adds a £700,000 contract to its recent successes

This follows other orders, in December for 5,000 assemblies a year and in November for the long term supply of 17 specialist connectors. The December order involves the machining of 11 components, the supply of 10 bought-in items, assembly, test and packaging. The November contract involves batches of 100 to 200 connectors for undersea sensor assemblies. According to joint managing director Charles Kenny, "Our continuous investment programme is now really paying-off in an extremely difficult subcontract market. It certainly helped through 2009 with almost 90 different customers placing business with us and leading to 40 per cent of production being exported." The £700,000 two-year contract involves a whole range of parts up to 64 mm diameter that will be produced on the Citizen and Miyano machines installed in the works. While some parts are relatively straightforward, others require complex turn-mill cycles to meet requirements of up to 50 dimensions that also require inspection and monitoring using SPC techniques. Materials include stainless and mild steel, aluminium and brass with certain parts requiring grinding, heat treatment and plating as part of Unicut's responsibility. It also includes operations to create sub-assemblies that will be carried out in the recently built clean room area within the machine shop. Joint managing director, Jason Nicholson, added: "During quarter one of 2010 we will also be working closely with the customer on design for production which should lead to the contracts being expanded throughout the year with new components. This could also involve further investment in plant and equipment, management systems and additional skilled machine setters."