N L Roper & Sons | Flat Lapping | Grinding | Polishing

At NL Roper and Sons Ltd, we specialise in surface finishing on a wide range of materials, including stainless steel, ceramics, rubber, glass and plastic composites. NL Roper and Sons Ltd specialise in flat lapping, flat grinding and polishing and provide a variety of precision surface finishes, ranging from 1.6µmRa– 0.05 µmRa. Our business has a customer base that serves a diverse sector of the manufacturing industry.

To hold tight tolerances, we use the flat lapping process. It is used as a “first off” from the initial component moulding and castings. This will give a datum for more conventional machining. Our unrivaled flat lapping process is also be used for intermediate or finishing processes.

Our skilled machine operators work a wide range of both single and double sided lapping machines enabling us to process a variety of materials ensuring flatness and parallelism of both faces and size variations per batch within 5 microns.

We achieve several different finishes and can lap, and fine grind a wide range of materials including aluminium, stainless steel, bakelite, ferrous, and non ferrous metals, ceramics, glass, and rubber composites, gold, tungsten, titanium, graphite composites and sintered glass.

We provide a competitive cylinder lapping service on cylinder heads, to ensure minimum stock removal. Our cylinder lapping service is superior to milling, especially on cylinder heads with steel inserts which therefore eliminates tool "bounce". We can process cylinder heads from garden machinery, mopeds, cars, commercial lorries and buses, up to 6 cylinders.

We provide flat grinding with our continuous production throughput machines. This allows us to remove material quicker than lapping and enables grinding of large volumes to consistent statistical control checks.

When a tolerance is too exact for grinding we have the facility to lap after grinding, thus giving a quick stock removal and a good finish within a tolerance, in our premises. Our specialist flat grinding process is ideal for larger production batches although smaller batches can be accommodated.

Our polishing process follows on from the lapping process. Polishing further enhances the final finish for mechanical and cosmetic purposes, to meet customer requirements. If needed, we can give a range of surface finishes or produce a mirror finish 0.05µmRa or better.