600 UK Open House a hit, says company

The three-day event saw UK and overseas customers, training providers, global distributors, suppliers, local and trade press, and many other engineering specialists in attendance at 600 UK's Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire headquarters. As well as unveiling its new manufacturing and office facility, 600 UK exhibited its range of advanced Tornado CNC turning centres, Alpha manual/CNC 'teach' lathes and Colchester and Harrison manual centre lathes. Also displayed were advanced workholding products from Pratt Burnerd International and taper roller bearings from Gamet Bearings. Completing the Openhouse line-up were the Raptor and D-Box fibre laser marking system from fellow 600 Group company, Electrox; Europa turret milling machines from RK International and fixturing and workholding from John Walton Ltd. The newly re-organised site houses dedicated manufacturing cells for all product lines, together with a customer showroom allowing the exhibiting of all 600 UK products. This is complemented by new offices for all 600 UK sales, support and head office staff. 600 UK managing director, Mike Berry (pictured), said: "As well as having the opportunity to showcase our superb new facility and product range, this Open House was our best ever in terms of visitor numbers, directly resulting in a number of significant new orders and some very strong enquiries from those who visited." Showing for the first time were Colchester's new 2- and 3-axis Tornado CNC turning centres, alongside its market leading Colchester and Harrison centre and Alpha CNC combination lathe ranges. The new Tornado is built using a modular design, which provides a most robust manufacturing platform, ensuring greater accuracy and reliability, giving CNC lathe operators even more value for money. Visitors also saw the launch of Pratt Burnerd Internationals new 'Gripfast' combination power chuck, which provides CNC lathe customers with a chuck, a collet chuck and a mandrel chuck all combined in the one unit, allowing instant set-up changes for medium to small batch production runs, increasing productivity and minimising non-machining time. "I would like to personally thank all those visitors who came to see us at this truly memorable event, which allowed us, at 600 UK, to demonstrate the customer focus of our machine tool business and our further expansion of our machine tool, spares, accessories and components manufacturing," Mr Berry concluded.