UK Precision, a precision engineering company based in Somerset, knows which side it’s batting for when the winners of Barclays One Small Step competition are announced in July 2010.

The company helped businessman Frank Thorogood, owner of Sidearm, develop and engineer prototypes of a product that could change the way in which cricket is practised the world over.

Sidearm offers high quality batting practice, allowing one person to provide a batsman with quick, accurate, swinging and seaming deliveries with little effort, replicating all the rhythms and trajectories of a real bowler.

International cricketers Graham Gooch and Paul Grayson see the Sidearm as ‘the most important improvement to batting practice in a generation’. Pace, bounce, swing and seam can easily be generated from the full length of the pitch and one person can throw to another for hours on end.

A complex engineering process lies behind the success of Sidearm and UK Precision was approached by Mr Thorogood to bring his ideas to life after prototypes from China failed to come up to scratch.

Emlyn Jones, an applications engineer at UK Precision explained: “Although at first glance the product – fashioned from natural polypropylene – looks like a simple piece of engineering, it is actually a lot more complex and needed six or seven set-ups in order to successfully manufacture the prototype.”

UK Precision used software SolidWorks to view the 3D model of the product and then fed the information into a CAE programme to execute a virtual machining process that would generate the programme for the machine tool – a Yang 1000 vertical machining centre with a variety of workholding devices.

Mr Thorogood is hoping that the outcome of the Barclays competition will see him start to manufacture up to 10,000 Sidearms in the next 12 months and the manufacturing specifications provided by UK Precision will be used extensively once production ramps up.

Mr Jones concluded: “At UK Precision we really excel in taking a product from its very early stages and then getting it to the point of production. We all wish Frank every success in the forthcoming Barclays competition.”

UK Precision
www.ukprecision.co.uk