Tony Bess, director of subcontract machinists Plalite Ltd in Sittingbourne, Kent, has in the last three years invested £1 million in capital equipment. Included in the purchases were two Japanese-built Speedio M140X2 30-taper mill-turn centres from Brother, supplied by sole UK agent, Whitehouse Machine Tools. The first of the 5-axis machines was installed in mid-2017 and proved so successful that a second was added six months later.
Plalite undertakes a lot of work requiring both milling and turning, so the multi-tasking capability of the M140X2s was attractive, as was their compact footprint on the shop floor. Mr Bess said, “On the Brother machines, the number of operations needed to produce a part is minimised, there are no concentricity issues, blending is perfect and the tolerances we are able to hold allows us to quote very accurate work.”