Rotamic specialises in complex precise turned parts for customers in industries that include aerospace, medical equipment and precision scientific instruments. It also manufactures its own medical products – pin index yokes and gas probes for hospital gases – and is equally at home working in stainless steels, titanium, magnesium, Nimonics or plastic.

As Rotamic’s owner and managing director Mark Curtis explains, “We tend to get the unusual and difficult parts that other people shy away from. That’s fine by me, I like a challenge. We do a lot of prototyping – which can be anything from one-offs to five or ten off – and a good batch size for us is 30 to 100. “Our own Rotamic products are available ex-stock and we can make them as we need to replenish that stock. If someone wants one they can have one and if they want a thousand they can have a thousand, and we do bespoke items too.

“These days, when skilled people are hard to find, and because there is so much competition from the Far East and Eastern Europe, we have to be smarter in how we utilise our labour here – so going for machinery that will enable parts to come off finished is the right way to go. We have identified a lot of parts where we can do that, including those that you would normally expect to make on a mill. It enables us to offer customers quicker turnaround and we can supply them on a kanban, E-ban or JIT basis.

“What we want to do is go from being an engineering focused  company to being a sales focused company. I don’t mean that we are taking our eye off the ball in terms of engineering, but we are concentrating on giving the customer more of what they want – and that can be more difficult with conventional machines.”

www.rotamic.co.uk