“We have broken the mould with this new showroom as it is double the size of any of our existing venues around the country. For the opening event we had 26 machines on display, and under power, and the available space means that we now have the ability to have on permanent display some of the larger machines in our range, including the 25 tonne XYZ VMC 2010,” says Nigel Atherton, XYZ Machine Tools’ managing director.
Despite poor weather, more than 50 companies attended the two-day event, from small sub-contractors through to blue-chip businesses. These visitors were not just interested in looking; more than £350,000 of machines were sold, and more orders are expected to follow in the coming days and weeks.
In addition, apprentice training organisation Total People, based at South Cheshire College, Crewe, was the lucky recipient of six months’ free use of an either an XYZ ProtoTRAK mill or lathe as winners of the prize draw. This machine will join the XYZ SMX3500 and SMX 2500 mills that it already has and will continue its standardisation on the ProtoTRAK control system, which it says it finds easy to use in training future engineers.
This new showroom doubles the space available in XYZ’s previous Nuneaton facility and also adds additional space for training and seminars. “Having this additional capacity to demonstrate much larger machines will be a big attraction for customers who had, in the past, had to make a visit to our 92,000 ft2 Devon headquarters to see these heavy-duty mills and lathes in our range. With the central location of Nuneaton we envisage a lot more demonstrations of these machines and introduce more companies to the high levels of build quality and capability of these larger machines in our range,” says Nigel Atherton.