With a facility in both Rugby and Hastings, the Techno Group has built an enviable reputation down the years in the subcontract manufacturing sector since it was founded in 1978. The company manufactures machined parts as well as assemblies, often taking a product from design for manufacture to supplying a complete product. The factory in Rugby was predominantly a turned parts facility for the aerospace industry with Covid bringing about diversification into automotive, fibre optics communication, laser equipment and connectors whereas the Hastings site takes on more milling work. The company has been applying cutting fluid solutions from Jemtech for several years, but this situation has evolved recently, as Adam Land from the Techno Group says: “When I joined the business around 2 ½ years ago, we had a good coolant in the machines, but we were using one supplier for the water-miscible coolants and another supplier for the neat oil coolants. This was okay, but we were having some minor quality issues and maybe some process stability issues.” “I felt this was an area for improvement for us. It is often the forgotten technology, yet it is the last thing that hits the workpiece on the tool, and it can and does have a real benefit in the production process. We went through a production study with a number of suppliers and asked them to look at productivity and quality improvements and Blaser from Jemtech was the chosen product at the end of the study. We now have Vasco 7000 running in our water-miscible machines and Vascomill 15 running on our neat oil machines.”
The Techno Group has since added the Cleanmist technology from Jemtech to its machine shop and referring to this, Adam says: “We have made a recent investment across all the water-miscible machines with the new mist extraction systems. Once again, we openly went into the marketplace for quotations and Jemtech provided us with a very competitive quote with a very good system. I also had an understanding of the filtration systems from before and it is a great system. Having the supply of the fluids and the filtration system from a single source gave us another advantage. So, when we were servicing our machines in terms of cleanouts or maybe a shutdown, we have the same people coming in and also doing the mist extraction services.” Looking to the future, Adam concludes: “We have a really exciting future ahead of us. That has started with an investment that is arriving in a couple of weeks with a new machine from Citizen, we are also looking at further investment in our milling section and a lights out automated cell. We are also recruiting apprentices as well as other roles across the business, so it really is an exciting time for the Techno Group.”
