Worcestershire-based Rotec Engineering Ltd — a specialist supplier of complex components to the aerospace, automotive and oil and gas sectors — has invested in the latest five-axis technology and CAD/CAM software to reduce set-up times and achieve ‘lights out’ manufacturing at its facility in Evesham.

The company has installed a new Nakamura NTRX 300 supplied by the Engineering Technology Group (ETG).

Paul Butler, Rotec Engineering’s managing director and owner, said: “It is a great machine. We’ve been involved with Nakamura for some time, and its technology is extremely reliable, very fast and very accurate.

In our endeavour to move forward and expand, we wanted a machine with all of these attributes that we could also program directly from our CAM system with full five-axis turning.

“We found that just focusing on cycle time wasn’t the right way forward for our business. There is often a lot of down-time between jobs, so the whole idea of this investment is to use the CAM system and the machine flexibility to reduce our set-up times; with a bar feed and auxiliary loader, we can run these challenging parts unmanned, and they come off the machine complete.”

ETG (www.engtechgroup.com), which is the UK’s exclusive supplier of Nakamura technology, worked with Rotec to source a machine that matched the company’s exact requirements; the NTRX 300’s milling head and two rotating spindles proved to be the clincher.