March 2020

As we all know, the UK required an enormous amount of ventilators to reduce the amount of lives lost through the Covid-19 pandemic.

As a supplier of medical components the Governments consortium were quick to contact us and identified us as a critical supplier. This meant that when Rolls-Royce were trying to find a firm suitable to produce some particularly tricky plastic components for the Ventilator Challenge UK, we were selected.

Rolls-Royce were in contact late on the last Wednesday of March, and by the end of the following day we had received provisional orders.  Our suppliers & dedicated staff insured we were in production by the Friday morning. Parts were produced 24/7 for the next 4 weeks .

We were able to secure this turn-milling work, partly due to the fact we have four sliding-head machines running with LFV (Low Frequency Vibration). This allows swarf to be chipped to a programmable length, rather than becoming stringy and potentially trapping itself around tooling, a common problem among plastic and some types of metal which may compromise productivity.

Overall,  around 75 %  of our machining capacity  were producing medical work for Ventilators and for existing customers supplying into the medical industry who had scaled up to suit demand for the pandemic. This also included our  Miyano fixed-head lathes, producing parts from bigger bar diameter up to 51mm. The rest of our turning capacity was fulfilling on-going work for firms continuing to operate through the UK lock down.

With our sites being spread over Dunstable and Luton, we were able to socially distance staff and maintain safe working environments. The staff really stepped up to complete this urgent medical work, a credit to our business.

Today we continue to manufacture components critical for sanitizing systems and equipment

Below is a customer testimonial .

“I wanted to get in contact to personally thank you and all the team @ Sub-CNC Precision for all the work you completed on the ventilator project.

You have all worked relentlessly to deliver and it is recognized. It has been fantastic to have you all involved and contributing to such an important project. 

The personal sacrifices have been to save lives . Thank you very much!”

Program Manager , Rolls-Royce