History of TDMK
First encounter to today...
First Encounter
35 years ago - First awareness of spark eroders or MDM whilst witnessing the Royal Navy's finest nuclear repair teams fix rotten steam drains systems onboard HMS Sovereign; this was back in the good old days of the cold war where we all knew where we stood and enemy submarines were not very good. Recent evidence suggests that this is (hopefully) still the case!
I can do that...
1987 - present. Having watched a few repairs it was apparent as a young Artificer Apprentice with a massive 4 years of training in fitting and turning this was 'easy-peasy' so when nuclear repair went home at 1600 (usually 1200 to be honest) the novice Artificer was authorised to use their machine to continue with repairs onboard without supervision. Since that day the bug of what can be achieved with spark erosion or EDM / MDM was formed and has continued on and off ever since.
Leaving the RN
On leaving the Royal Navy in 2016 (after 33 years and 2 out of 3 'bravery' medals being achieved by Her Majesty's long reign) it seemed a good idea to start an engineering business. Deadline Engineering was formed with a state of the art UK wide service that even included a van with a 450V generator onboard to power everything required on a state of the art TDMK 15kVA machine - so yes a very large broken bolt or tap could be removed from a wind turbine in a field. However, the harsh realities of a starting a new small business chasing work and more importantly getting paid hit home. Doing the work was the easy bit and an 8-4 job writing the Haynes manual for repairing nuclear submarines took over for a while to pay the gas bill.
Today
Having formed a great friendship with Keith of TDMK Ltd during the early days of Deadline it seemed a natural fit to take on TDMK's contracts, machines, spares, tooling and a small percentage of Keith's knowledge before his well-earned retirement. The focus on Keith selling the business was not monetary, it was mostly aimed at not letting down his existing customers that had stopped him from retiring much earlier. Hence TDMK was re-born and continues to this day fixing stuff when it is the most sensible, cost-effective, option and also servicing and repairing machines built by Keith for both Electro Arc and later TDMK Ltd for over 40 years.
