Visit to WDS Components Ltd. – Thursday 27th March 2025
Members of the association and their guests were invited to the premises of WDS Components Limited. The company has recently joined the Leeds Association of Engineers as a corporate member. Our president John Aldersley kindly forwarded this report below:-
“WDS was well attended, we were all fed and watered. I was asked to call in earlier to meet the Sales Director Mark Moody who was very pleased that the company has joined the association and wants to support the association. Mark showed me his colleague Sam’s 3D printing and how the company can produce prototypes to show customers, which is always a good thing.
We had a chat with each other at the trade counter. The staff were very welcoming with the guys showing us around doing it in their own time, which says a lot about them. Mark and Sam took us up into the meeting room and we were shown some company history and the products. Mark said that they had 3 million pounds of stock (£3,000,000) and that they knew that it was not a good thing to have some many engineers around who may find the odd bit jumping in their pockets. A stock take had been done and we would be searched on the way out. We all found it very funny ! Mark said the only department that didn’t have an engineer was accounts. As we had an accountant with us, we all smiled as ours is also a cracking engineer !
Then we went onto the shop floor, past racks of parts, 40% made at the site. The catalogue is extensive and the company guarantees stock to be held and a discount to the customer if 10% is not available. The shop floor was very clean and well set out and on one level. The offices are open plan upstairs. We went to the machining section first, with a very well-presented horizontal machining centre that was being set up. Next to that a new XYZ vertical machining centre that we saw in some detail later on. It was milling blank tee-nuts to a very high specification, using a quick change precision (German) setting fixture. The company are looking to produce their own at some stage.
We spent some time looking at the new twin spindle multi-axis lathe that was making a top quality flange nut with an American coarse thread. The part was complete when it was parted off and the machine was equipped with a bar feed that could take 7 bars, and again run unattended
We then had a look at the slide head CNC lathes. I find them fascinating and still after 40 odd years of CNC turning a bit strange. Myself and Neil Cobbold poked our heads in to watch the lathe turn a long threaded part with a knurled head similar to the picture above. Talking to the skilled turner who was running the machines he explained that he was threading the part in three sections, which to those who do turning (lathe work) may know long threads cut using a single point method are prone to chatter, and were traditionally die boxed or thread rolled. So this method used on the stainless part I found very interesting and I was shown the CNC program, and the sub routine that the machine used. Once it was told the pitch, depth of cut, angle of thread, speed and various other thread details, the machine used a G33 threading cycle, not a more commonly used conventional G76 threading cycle. We were then shown the grinding department and were told WDS actually make running centres and machine parallels having now taken over the name from ‘Jones and Shipman’.
After that we looked at the new powder coating plant, adding some colour to other than the traditional black anodised parts, or better named chemical blacking. Our final shop floor visit was to the Franklin Spencer parts, using compressed air to operate a hydraulic holding system, with Sam showing us an aluminium cylinder head held on a what I can describe as a hydraulic ball joint. All very impressive.
We finished off back in the meeting room with a few more questions and left with some nice freebies, a coaster, 5 metre tape measure which will come in very useful, a USB stick and a commemorative circular disc. I thanked WDS and left after a being frisk-searched and passed the metal detecting security (only joking ! ) All in all, a great visit. We extend many thanks to our new corporate member ‘WDS Components Limited’.”
J. Aldersley, President – March 2025
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WDS Location:- WDS Components
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