Micro-machining in the UK “is a bit of a forgotten art”, suggests University of Sheffi eld Advanced
Manufacturing Research Centre’s (AMRC) engineer Emma Parkin. The AMRC has undertaken a
demonstration to highlight its capabilities and aims to spread the micro-machining word
“In the UK, it is mostly SMEs that use
micro-machining. It’s a bit of a
forgotten art over here. It is
expensive to do, because of the machinery
you need to purchase in order to achieve the
accuracies desired. You may be producing
tiny little parts, but there is so much
precision that goes into it, it ends up
becoming quite expensive.
“The majority of micro-machining is
produced in Europe, with Switzerland being
the most well-known, and because of this a
lot of work gets sent there – incurring a
further decline in knowledge in the UK.
“There are a lot of companies that use
micro parts, but there are only a very few
companies in the UK now that actually
specialise in micro-machining; mostly people
just send work out of the country.
“We have a few places in the UK that
specialise in high precision but the numbers
are few. It’s more machine tool companies
and cutting tool companies who tend to sell
you their machines and pass on some
knowledge, but to me that is not the best
MICRO-MACHINING GETTING UP TO SPEED ON THE SMALL STUFF
way, which is where we come in, and what
we’re trying to do – have tech that we can
give out to companies to bridge that gap.”
So Advanced Manufacturing Research
Centre (AMRC) engineers Emma Parkin and
Joe Thickett have created a tiny artwork to
show off the AMRC Machining Group’s
capabilities, with the goal of bolstering
industry knowledge on micro-machining to
help UK rms win business. The pair have
used the AMRC’s Bumotec mill-turn to micromachine
The Queen’s head onto a piece of
brass, using cutting tools so small they are
barely visible to the naked eye.
TINY DETAILS HARDLY VISIBLE
The machined portrait of Her Majesty,
measuring just 1.4 mm, is so small that the
intricate detail can only be seen clearly
through a powerful microscope. It is a major
achievement for the pair, who wanted to
create the tiny artwork to show off the AMRC
Machining Group’s capabilities with the goal
of bolstering industry knowledge on micromachining
to help UK rms win business.
The face was created using a seven-axis
Starrag (https://is.gd/yabegi) Bumotec S-191
mill-turn centre, an industry leading high
accuracy machine tool platform. Parkin and
Thickett’s deep understanding of the
machine’s behaviour allowed them to
produce four remarkably detailed Queen’s
heads having diameters of 11.2, 7, 2.8 and
1.4 mm on a single circular piece of brass
measuring 25 mm across.
They used micro-end-mill cutting tools
supplied by Sandvik Coromant (https://
is.gd/layuhe) to achieve the basic shape of
the design before switching to tiny but
incredibly precise ballnose cutters – the
smallest of which measures just 0.2 mm –
to carry out the detailed contouring of the
Queen’s face.
“We chose the Queen as a portrait,
because we wanted to do something similar
to a coin as it is relatable, people generally
know the size of a coin; so to be able to
scale it down in size yet still keep the
Queen’s face on there is the ‘wow’ factor.
“We wanted to show our partners and
The AMRC’s Machining
Group is using its Bumotec
mill-turn to highlight micromachining
possibiities to UK
companies
Micro-machining push
www.machinery.co.uk | MachineryMagazine | @MachineryTweets | April 2020 31
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/yabegi
/layuhe