Drilling for gold

With eight orders confirmed in the month following Hone-All Precision participation in the recent Offshore Europe oil and gas industry exhibition and currently more than 30 enquiries to the good, the Leighton Buzzard-based subcontractor is understandably delighted with the response.

Hone-All's sphere of expertise is in the production of long holes to tight tolerances and in many cases this extends to sub-micron geometrical tolerances and specific surface finish requirements.

On the opening day of the Offshore Europe exhibition, held in Aberdeen, Jim Murphy, Scottish Secretary, pointed out that the skills gained in the North Sea are transportable and transferable to any part of the world where there is an offshore industry. For its part, Hone-All has shown that the specialist machining skills that have been the hallmark of the business since it was formed in 1979 are also transportable and transferable. Its deep hole drilling methods, for example, are used to produce holes with high length-to-diameter ratios, good surface finish and straightness in high value added components destined for a number of challenging applications.

The commitment to maintaining the ISO9001 and aerospace accredited company's specialist skills in honing, gun drilling and deep hole boring has been matched by an extension of its machining capabilities to provide a precision machining service. This, according to director Andrea Rodney, has equipped Hone-All for the challenges posed by high technology industry sectors such as oil and gas, automotive, motorsport, and aerospace.

In fact, Hone-All's recent accreditation to AS9100, the international aerospace quality standard, has been achieved with a conformance rate of 95.5% in the first full system audit of the company's production processes and quality procedures undertaken by the British Standards Institution.

The successful outcome of five months of hard work by the 25 strong Hone-All team underpinned the company's participation in this month's Aero Engineering 2009 exhibition, in itself an indication of the continuing determination to promote Hone-All's expertise to a wider audience.

The expertise translates to the drilling of holes with a ratio of depth-to-diameter that can be up to 150:1, and often in difficult-to-machine materials such as austenitic stainless steel and nickel-chromium superalloys. “It is a priority to prevent the drill from wandering outside of the allowable parameters and an absolute requirement to remove swarf quickly from a very confined space in order to avoid damaging the machined surface,” explains managing director, Colin Rodney. “This is particularly important prior to honing where we are often required to achieve mirror finishes of 0.1µm Ra/4µ inch CLA.” As well as transferring its skills to new sectors of the manufacturing industry, Hone-All has literally transported its in-house skills base to much larger premises and removed what Mrs Rodney describes as the previous barriers to growth. “We decided to turn our adversity into our advantage,” she says. “By 2006 we had reached breaking point in terms of capacity, although demand for our quality and services continued to grow. Lack of space was preventing the installation of additional machine tools and contributing to excessive material movements as operating from two separate sites was resulting in lost time and longer leadtimes. Also various other constraints were threatening to derail our continuous improvement programme.

“However, despite the many obstacles along the way, within 12 months we managed to re-locate to new 20,000ft² premises and have since been able to provide an improved service to our customers and a more secure future for our team.”

Hone-All
www.hone-all.co.uk