Duright grows following investment
in BLM all electric benders
Wednesbury-based Duright Engineering has built a reputation as one of the
UK’s leading tube cutting and processing sub-contractors and its adoption
of laser tube cutting from an early stage. With the family-owned business
looking to continue its growth strategy, managing director Ross Taylor had
two options, more of the same, or diversify and expand the tube bending
side of the business.
Taking the second option has proved highly
successful, with turnover increasing by more
than 55 per cent in the last financial year. Much
of this growth attributed to the addition of two
BLM ELECT all-electric tube benders.
rectangular tube up to 120 mm section in lengths
up to 8.6 metres. Duright was one of the first in the
UK to adopt fiber optic laser and it is very unusual
for the tube sector to be leading the flat sheet
sector, but when it came to fiber laser the tube
industry was way ahead of the curve. “We had our
first fiber laser from BLM four years ago and we are
surprised that people still buy CO2 tube lasers as
we cannot see any downside with fiber, especially
on the mix of materials that we are cutting.”
“We are well known across our key industry sectors
of automotive, rail, agricultural equipment and
shopfitting for our tube laser cutting capabilities,
and we could have opted to expand further on
this, but as tube laser accounted for 70 per cent
of our business we wanted to opt for a different
strategy and tube bending, particularly larger
diameter tube bending, provided an opportunity
to become a single source option for a lot of
customers, providing laser and bending under the
one roof,” says Ross Taylor.
With the success of its Tube laser business it
would be the easy option to further expand this
and bring in more of the same, but the greater
potential for business growth came from tube
bending. Here again Duright could have simply
expanded on what it had, but reviewing the
market it spotted opportunities to develop
opportunities in bending larger diameter tube.
The decision, therefore, was taken to invest in two
ELECT, all-electric, multi-stack tube benders from
BLM. The first to be installed was an ELECT 102
machine with capacity to bend tube up to 102
mm diameter with a wall thickness up to 2.5 mm,
Duright already operates four BLM tube laser
machines 24 hours, six days a week, the latest of
these being the ADIGE LT FIBER tube laser systems.
This combined laser capability allows Duright to
process round tube up to 154 mm and square
TN JULY 2017
4