Pandect Precision Components has its 60th anniversary this month

Pandect Precision Components has its 60^th anniversary this month

Our slip ring company has been designing, making and supplying custom slip ring assemblies for defence and aerospace customers around the world for 60 years.

Pandect Precision Components Ltd. (PPC) is a private limited company and now our major shareholder is Hilary Pope, she is also a director of the company. It was her father Stan Purkiss (see the first photograph) , an aeronautical instrument engineer, along with other engineers employed by his company, Pandect Instrument Laboratories Ltd, who formed Pandect Precision Components Ltd.  on 26^th May 1964. Hilary is married to Rodney Pope, who is our Managing Director. Today PPC is our major business.

We have been designing and building slip rings, either as complete slip ring assemblies (SRA’s), or as separate ring assemblies and brushes, for high-reliability defence and aerospace applications in all shapes and sizes, ever since.  The next picture shows a very large “pancake” SRA for armoured fighting vehicles “AFV’s” from our fairly early days. 

A recent very large SRA is shown next, both in its assembly stage, where you can see its very high-power outer rings and its hundreds of low current/voltage inner signal rings (i.e. this is a “concentric” design). Unlike the previous picture of a large pancake, this is a cylinder design and the next picture shows colleagues around it when it had been completed. It’s for a military radar, on board a warship and inside the inner rings are more functions, including a hydraulic rotary joint to cool the radars’ magnetron. Many of our designs today include functions inside them beyond the SRA itself, which were not possible when PPC was founded in1964, such as fibre optic rotary joints (FORJ) and modern RF rotary joints (RoJo).

In comparison with these two large designs the next two pictures show two examples of very small SRA’s which are in present volume production. One of these is for the guidance of the world’s fastest short range, surface to air missile (SAM).  In extreme comparison with the previous radar design, these SRA’s for very high-speed missiles need to operate for seconds, not years. But having been assembled in their missiles and stored for sometimes years, they must work to spec immediately on launch. And they must work subject to enormous acceleration and to a vibration regime which is very different to that of a radar on a ship (or a radar fixed to the ground, or on a towed vehicle, or on an aircraft -all are different). So, this is why the thousands of SRA’s that PPC has designed and manufactured since 1964 are custom ones; no off-the-shelf standard part SRA is ever going to satisfy our high-reliability customers’ exacting specification demands as well as our custom designs do. Our customers value the very close technical support that our professional engineers provide to them, whether it is for a tiny design, or a huge one, or any size in between.

If you want to know more about our history please read the section of our website  https://www.pandect.co.uk/about-us/about-pandect/pandects-history/ .

Pandect Precision Components is always moving forward. An innovation from our technology road map is the next picture which shows our PPC1984 “platform product” This SRA solution is optimized for high-definition optical systems which must not have latency. We have designed it so that we can readily offer variants for different numbers of channels to exactly fit our different customers’ specifications. We have started demonstrating it under NDA to our present customers and we will have it on the exhibition stands of our Japanese representatives, NASCo, http://www.nasco.co.jp/e_index.html  in Tokyo this autumn  at https://www.japanaerospace.jp/en/,  followed by in Istanbul at https://www.sahaexpo.com/homepage  on the stand of our  Turkish representatives, TMS Elektronik, http://www.tms-elektronik.com/en/electro-mechanical-components/electro-mechanical-components 

If you want to see the demo at these exhibitions, please contact our representatives.  If you have an application for 12G SDI /CoaXPress 12.5 that needs minimal latency please contact [email protected].