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Published Editorial Drive for quality underpinned by investment at NSP Engineering
Originally founded as an engineering sub-contract business in 1968, NSP Engineering has now grown into one of the few remaining UK-owned air rifle manufacturing companies, which through strategic investment in its manufacturing technology is growing its market share both in the domestic and export markets.
Hailsham-based NSP Engineering started life as Organ Engineering when the present managing director, Bob Nicholls, joined forces with an old school friend Dave Organ, and his father Alf, to start a part-time sub-contract engineering business. The success of this facilitated a move to Hailsham in 1969, when Alf retired in the mid 70s and Dave moved away from engineering two new partners came on board these being Smith and Pickering to create the current business NSP Engineering. Smith and Pickering owned Sussex Armoury, a business supplying a variety of equipment for country pursuits, which included having a range of air rifles manufactured. Much of the subcontract work came the way of the now named NSP Engineering.
It was with the demise of Sussex Armoury in the early 80s that Bob Nicholls took complete ownership of the company; this resulted in NSP manufacturing and marketing their own range of air rifles, trading under the newly formed brand name of Air Arms. The 90s saw the decision to move away from general sub-contracting and concentrate on the manufacture of its own range of air rifles. The past 15 years have seen strong growth at NSP Engineering and, with the takeover of another brand, Falcon, the growth over the last ten years has been significant, with production volumes increasing by almost 300 per cent.
To accommodate this growth in output NSP Engineering has had a policy of investing in its production equipment, with the addition of two Matsuura Flexible Manufacturing systems, a Yamazaki Mazak Integrex multi-tasking machine, a Yamazaki Mazak flatbed laser and imminently two Star sliding head lathes. These investments have allowed a higher production rate to be achieved but the drive has always been to manufacture a product that is recognised as the best value for money air rifle on the market. To achieve this, NSP turned its attention to the look and feel of the product.
"We are now recognised as a premium brand but we are constantly looking at ways to improve the value for money of our products and one area that we wanted to develop was the standard of finish on components visible to our customers, such as the gun barrel and air cylinder, without increasing unit costs," says NSP Engineering's General Manager, Alan George. "The process up to now had been to linish the parts in-house, using an Autopulit CT-II-150 centreless linisher supplied by Ellesco, the parts were then sent out for polishing and chemical blacking. However, in conversation with John Spiers at Ellesco, we identified an opportunity to bring this work back in-house by investing in an Autopulit MA six spindle mop polishing machine."
Designed specifically for the longitudinal polishing of tube and bar the Autopulit MA is a highly productive machine. The system installed at NSP Engineering is equipped with six spindles and two polishing heads, each with six polishing mops. The workpieces are held between tailstocks, which rotate (or index if the part is not cylindrical or oval) and reciprocate to ensure 100 per cent coverage of the part by the mops. To ensure the optimum surface finish the reciprocation speed is finely controlled by inverters and each of the polishing heads feature axial oscillation and a pneumatic flotation system, which compensates for wear on the buffing mops.
"With the introduction of the Autopulit MA machine our standard of finish improved ten-fold overnight," says Alan George. "Initially, because of the learning curve and the adaption to the new technology, we found that our unit costs did increase slightly. However, now that we are familiar with both the machine and process these costs are now coming back into line and the end result is that we have dramatically improved the visual quality of the product without increasing the price to our customers."
Throughout the entire process Ellesco has been on-hand to provide advice and support and to ensure that the final specification of the machine was a perfect match for NSP Engineering's requirements. This included the specification of the dust extraction system, an area that was important to NSP Engineering both from a health and safety point of view and a housekeeping perspective. "Ensuring that the working environment is kept as clean as possible, given the type of process involved, is crucial as it has a knock-on effect to component quality if the surrounding area is dirty," says Alan George. "By improving the quality of our polishing, to such a degree, we have also had to improve other areas of manufacturing, as the standard to which the Autopulit machine was working to, identified issues with previous operations which have had to be addressed. The result is a further positive effect on product quality."
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