Originally Published MPMN May 2009

MD&M EAST 2009: FIRST-TIME EXHIBITORS

Guidewires, Screws, and Mandrels are Supplier's Daily Grind

Bob Michaels

Half a century and counting. That's how long M&S Centerless Grinding Inc. (Hatboro, PA) has been in the business of providing grinding services to a range of industries. Today, with an increasing focus on the medtech industry, the family-run company offers precision centerless and cylindrical grinding services to medical device manufacturers across North America and Europe. Employing an array of precision grinding equipment, the company can achieve tolerances on component diameters, geometries, and features that used to be considered impossible.

"We always did a bit of work for the medical industry--grinding bars for screw machines or grinding device components," recounts Shegda, who joined his brother in acquiring the business from their father in 1990. "Then about 10 years ago, we made a concerted effort to concentrate more on the medical and aerospace industries, since they seemed to fit best with the company's high-end grinding philosophy."

To further that effort, the company acquired flexible grinding equipment in the late 1990s that enabled it to complete several difficult projects in the medical device area, including a locking pin for a heart-valve clip and a critical piece for a blood-testing instrument. Following a plant expansion a few years later, it redoubled its efforts to focus on the medical sector, the only market that Shegda thought could hold up well "even if the general economy went south."

In 2007, a year before Shegda became the company's sole owner, M&S strengthened its medical machine mix by adding a guidewire grinder to perform contract manufacturing services. "We do not design, market, or try to sell guidewires, like many companies in the industry." Shegda emphasizes. "All we want to do is grind."

In addition to guidewires and K-wires, the company grinds screws, hypotubes, core pins, mandrels, microsized parts for implants, and parts for dilators. Using multiaxis CNC OD/ID, Swiss-type centerless, CNC centerless, ultraprecision centerless, and precision centerless grinding methods, M&S can produce multiple part features such as diameters, tapers, radii, flats, and threads in one operation. It can also achieve diameter tolerances to ±0.00005 in., concentricity of ground features to submicron tolerances, diameters as small as 0.002 in., and finishes to 4 Ra.

Highlighting these products and its guidewire grinding capability, the company will also acquaint MD&M East attendees with its core-pin grinding expertise, which enables it to produce core pins with the intricate shapes and tiny diameter sizes required by many medical devices. Shegda comments, "When people visit our booth, we will be trying to change their preconceived idea of what centerless grinding is."

M&S Centerless Grinding Inc.
www.msgrinding.com
Booth #2729

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