A MAJOR international engineering award has come to East Lancashire for a unique machining centre.

Weston Electrical Units of Foulridge scooped one of the Machinery magazine awards for innovation in production engineering for a £1.7 million rotary transfer centre developed by the firm.

The centre is capable of carrying out 103 different machining operations and cutting processes - that normally take minutes - in just 15 seconds.

Weston executive chairman Geoff Sutton came up with idea for the machine after failing to find anything capable of doing the high volume work needed by the firm to compete with the Far East on its components for computer disc drives.

"We would have needed an awful lot of conventional high-tech machinery to do the same thing and we needed a solution that took the labour out of it," said Mr Sutton. "I assembled a team of machine tool design people and in less than a year we had the finished centre. It was a very complex operation involving more than 40 suppliers from across the world."

Mr Sutton says the potential for what he describes as his firm's 'secret weapon' is huge.

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