Production
Manufacturing starts with Procurement, often one of the most time-consuming stages of the job. Working from the components lists, parts lists and schedules of fasteners forming part of the drawing set, the various items required are ordered and consigned to a production store as they are received. Some commonly used items may be drawn from general stock and transferred to the production store, provided that all parts in the store are covered by a supplier's Certificate of Conformance.
In the case of single-sourced components, long lead items or devices suspected of having a short market lifetime, a generous spares allowance is made. Where such items are expensive the situation is discussed with the customer and a spares holding specified in the contract for warranty repair purposes. Sometimes it is necessary to have a component specially developed for the job by another company, and here Spectral Line Systems Ltd has extensive experience of preparing suitable sub-contracts. In low phase noise work reliance is often made on the noise performance of some component even although this parameter is unspecified in the data sheet. In such cases it is necessary to measure component batches for added phase noise and select for production.
Machined parts are either procured outside or manufactured in house according to quantity. Our in-house machining facilities although good are more on the scale of a tool room than a production machine shop. We have two such facilities similarly equipped, one in our Tarbert works and one in our South of Scotland base, the latter being used mainly for R & D prototypes. The Tarbert workshop produces small production batches of parts, and is invaluable when faced with excessive lead times quoted by outside machining companies.
We machine mainly in aluminium alloy, copper, brass and plastics, and are capable of manufacturing any mechanical part or assembly used in our designs, including waveguide components as well as items such as housings and baseplates. Our range of machine tools varies from CNC mills down to a minute watchmaker's lathe for work on small coaxial parts and semi rigid cables.
Unusually for a microwave and RF engineering company, we also have a substantial woodworking shop in which we manufacture all our own packing cases as well as high quality cabinets and enclosures for our "Curikela" range of RF constructional kits, and for some items of production test gear which do not require electromagnetic screening by the outer protective case.