From a block of marble to the “Venus de Milo”...

H&M would never claim to produce great works of art, but its work nonetheless requires consummate craftsmanship and attention to detail. And even the “Venus de Milo”, over 2,000 years ago, started out as just another block of marble.

In fact, the anonymous sculptor of the “Venus” wouldn’t have worried about an extra millimetre or two here and there. Even the point selected for the first cut into the marble would not have had any decisive impact on the final form of the work.

That’s not the case at H&M. For a precision milling job, the operator has to input the exact shape of the workpiece, and specify precisely where the tool is to begin its meticulously drawn route through the material. That’s because this starting point provides the basis for the path followed by the tool through the three dimensions of the object, as defined via the Tebis system, down to fractions of a tenth of a millimetre.

To speed up the process, the blank is carefully prepared, to keep the amount of material the tool has to cut away down to a minimum.

These preparations are crucial for the quality of the end product, whatever it may be: a data control model, a foam tool, a cubing model or a test gauge.

So the material is sawn, planed, ground and measured to create a blank with exactly the right form and dimensions required for the final machining operation.