Butt machining - We deliver custom-made rails overnight

Does your customer require special rails or shafts that exceed standard dimensions - and preferably as quickly as possible? No problem for PICARD! We machine custom rails and shafts at our in-house linear motion centre. From our online shop, simply use the linear configurator to order your desired products by the metre configured according to your customer’s specifications. We also just recently added butt machining to our offer. This is particularly useful, for example, if your customer requires unusually long rails and the standard length of the selected product is not sufficient. One great advantage of this processing method is that our special end machining enables a continuous connection of rail sections, so that rails can theoretically be assembled together in infinite lengths.

In contrast to conventional separation, the end faces of the rails are ground during the butt machining process so that there is no gap and a tolerance of just 0.02 mm. This is extremely important for allowing the individual elements to be "seamlessly" fitted together later by the user and the carriages to run smoothly on the rails. After being machined, the matching end points are marked with a laser device so that the fitter knows which rail elements are compatible with each other.

Overnight to Slovakia by courier

A prime example in the field comes from one of our customers in Slovakia. Their end customer needed two sets of 7.6 metre rails by express delivery, but the standard length of the selected rail was only 3 metres. So our specialists in the linear motion centre butt machined these rails and then cut them respectively to dimensions of 2880 mm, 2880 mm, and 1840 mm.

Then came the next challenge: The rails, which were still quite long, needed to be delivered to Slovakia as quickly as possible; standard or express shipping was not an option for our customer. So they opted for our overland courier service, which delivered the rails to a location near Bratislava by taxi within hours. The shipment was picked up from our company location in Bochum at 8.30 pm and delivered to the customer near Bratislava just around 12 hours later at 8.45 am!

We cleared two hurdles in a very short timeframe on this job:

1. Short-term, customised butt machining of multiple linear rails: Check!
2. Lightning-fast delivery covering nearly 1000 km by land overnight: Check!

You can find more information about our shipping options here: