Company Purchases Zeiss Accura II CMM
DENVER, NC – May 5, 2021 – With increasing production over the last several months, Gray Manufacturing Technologies, LLC saw a logjam of parts needing to pass inspection through its two coordinate measuring machines.
Seeing the problem, Compass Precision, LLC, Gray’s parent company, did something about it.
Compass provided investment capital for Gray, a leading manufacturer of precision metal components, specializing in 5-axis machining and automation, to purchase a new Zeiss Accura II CMM.
“Gray Manufacturing has a fabulous collection of manufacturing equipment, highlighted by its eight 5-axis machining centers,” explained Compass CEO Gary Holcomb. “We needed to step up and match these mills with the corresponding capacity for automatically inspecting all these complicated parts. So we did.”
This acquisition brings a third Zeiss Accura II CMM to Gray. The machine, which the company bought new in April directly from Zeiss with NSI Viking as the distributor, is an exact copy of one of the other two Zeiss CMMs it already had. The new Zeiss can inspect 900 millimeters in the x-direction, 1,200 millimeters along the y-direction and 800 millimeters in the z-direction.
The new Zeiss CMM has been operational for almost three weeks. Gray President Jerry Soots has already called it a “tremendous asset.”
“We were bottlenecking production simply because that large [Zeiss] machine was at capacity and the smaller [Zeiss] machine just couldn’t keep up,” he said. “So we decided to get another smaller Accura II machine. It’s really unplugged the bottleneck that we’ve seen.”
Prior to the purchase, Jerry said that the smaller Zeiss machine he described handled 90 percent of the workflow. Meanwhile, the larger Zeiss was booked with large parts Gray has recently begun producing because of increased production. The cycle times on the large Zeiss were sometimes in excess of four hours.
The addition of the third Zeiss CMM ensures production at the Compass operating company stays on schedule.
Gray Manufacturing operates from a 25,000-square-foot facility in Denver NC, which is 30 miles northwest of Charlotte. The company concentrates in creating extremely complicated components often made out of difficult-to-work-with materials such as titanium and Inconel.
The Compass operating company was founded in 2013. Johnny Gray, a wealthy entrepreneur, financed the creation of the company and then sold it during 2020 to Compass Precision.
Main Street Capital Holdings, a Pittsburgh-based private equity firm, founded Compass Precision in 2019. Main Street acquired three CNC machining sister companies — Advanced Machining & Tooling, LLC, Quality Products & Machine, LLC and Tri-Tec Industries, LLC — in the Charlotte area during 2019 and placed them under a new umbrella company, Compass Precision, LLC.
Less than a year later, Compass added Gray in Aug. 2020. In March 2021, Compass expanded outside of North Carolina and acquired Douglas Machining Services, LLC in Winona, MN.