NEW jobs are expected to be created at a Ryedale engineering company after it officially launched a £500,000 advanced, high-efficiency machining facility.

Christopher Shaw, chairman of Micro Metalsmiths (MM), which already employs about 150 people, revealed the firm was hoping its investment would lead to a recruitment drive. He said it was too early to tell how many extra staff the business, which is based in Pickering and Kirkbymoorside, might take on.

The move would come as a boost to Ryedale, which has been hit by scores of redundancies in the wake of the global credit crunch.

MM manufactures a range of products, including components for radar and parts for print machines, trains, planes and bottling plants, for markets across Europe, the USA, Japan, Taiwan and India.

Mr Shaw said the company developed the new facility, which is housed at its Pickering site, because the present-day market place required even higher degrees of accuracy than could normally be achieved by MM’s previous generation of machine tools, which operated at maximum spindle speeds of 10,000 revs per minute.

The facility will contain nine new machine tools, each worth about £70,000. The tools can engineer components to an accuracy of five microns – equivalent to five thousandths of a millimetre.

Mr Shaw said: “Our new equipment also means we can work three times more quickly and we are now making parts that 18 months ago we could not have considered producing. No one else is able to do exactly what we do.”

Howard Keal, Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate for Malton and Thirsk, said: “I’m deeply impressed by the commitment of Micro Metalsmiths to invest strongly in the future. It is winning new orders right now regardless of tough trading conditions because no one is better at doing what it does.”

Mr Shaw said: “We started the business in 1964 when most of the world’s radar systems were made in the UK. That total has now dwindled to about five per cent.

“Many other manufacturing industries have been lost to the country; so we are increasingly reliant on exporting to keep growing. We export more than 40 per cent of our regular metal components and about 85 per cent of our output of microwave devices.”

He encouraged aspiring engineers to apply to join MM’s apprenticeship scheme. For details, phone MM on 01751 472866.