Specnow is a small business operating in the niche market for vacuum thermal processes. Our main customer base is in the UK; we also supply and service installations throughout mainland Europe, in Ireland, and North America. The company is structured as a fast response projecting and service team. In house strengths include: design, IT, precision engineering, advanced materials fabrications, and bespoke systems construction. We maintain a workshop and an assembly shop in two adjacent buildings, allowing us to have complete control over the whole design and build process. Over the last 12 years Specnow’s efficient and agile multi-skill business model has given its customers a stable supplier, providing a cost effective and dependable service.

Our major products are Vacuum Furnaces and Electron Beam Welding machines; they are customised for the application and delivered as a turnkey solution. We also design and supply special plant such as Induction Vacuum Rigs, and miniature jigged assembly processors for precision heat treatments. The furnaces are generally modest in scale (typically 30 – 60 litres loadable volume) and are applied to small component batch processing. The salient features and benefits of our designs are related to flexibility, high performance, and user friendliness. The furnaces are suited equally to R&D and production, with an increasing number of clients carrying out both disciplines in the same unit.

Most of our new build and rebuild projects utilise our own SCADA HMI controller known as Microlink. The control station is integrated in the machine frame remotely, which makes it ideal for clean room locations. Many users operate several furnaces; our latest versions allow all units to be operated from the same station. Rebuilding is a key activity and because of the concomitant savings has become a preferred choice for many clients in recent years. Our success has been built on the simplification of the machine construction and increased capability conferred by the SCADA HMI. Lower component count means increased reliability; the plant rarely if ever breaks down between scheduled maintenance. This has created a significant increase in MTBF’s with customers’ machines.

Our continuous development of this technology since the late 90’s has provided new solutions to process, service support, and response. At the machine, help screens are available to the operator for programming and troubleshooting. When invited on line, our engineers are able to check the system for faults or performance concerns. We regularly visit overseas customers in this way and save the cost of a call out. Major changes can be made to the function of the machines, their management and processes, to meet the users’ new requirements; the software can be updated on line.