Product category:
CNC lathes
News Release from: Colchester-Harrison | Subject: Tornado 110 slant bed CNC lathe
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 18 July 2003
Teenager becomes youngest Tornado user
At the end of last year Timothy Bittleston bought a second-hand Tornado 110 slant bed CNC lathe for GBP 25,000 and became the youngest user at 19 years old, said Colchester.
At the end of last year Timothy Bittleston bought a second-hand Colchester Tornado 110 slant bed CNC lathe for 25,000 (pounds sterling) According to Mike Dawes, sales director at Colchester Sales, he became the youngest Tornado 110 user on the company's books at just 19 years old! But he is no newcomer to precision turning
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 5 Jul 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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At eight years old he was "faffing around" he says with a tiny Unimat jeweller's lathe in his bedroom at home in St Albans.
At 11 he joined the local model engineering society and started making - and selling - copy attachments for wood turning lathes.
By the time he was 14, he needed more space and constructed a six metre square shed in his parent's back garden and turned it into a proper workshop.
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His new machine shop was then equipped with a Myford ML7 manual centre lathe, a small milling machine, a pillar drill, band saw, shaping machine, grinder and a Centec air-operated automatic milling machine.
It was much better than doing a paper round like all my friends and I was getting 30 (pounds sterling) for a job.
Wow! That was five weeks pocket money in one go!" Unfortunately, says Timothy Bittleston: "That all had to go when they knocked down the factory next door and built houses.
They said the dream of my life was too noisy." But when it came to modern CNC lathes, Timothy Bittleston just knew he wanted a Colchester.
Having left school at 16 with good GCSEs "They asked me to stay on and do maths, physics and technology at A-level," he says, "but I preferred to take a more interesting life working for a small St Albans sub-contract engineering company Crew and Saunders Engineering, where I had two weeks job experience while at school." He describes how the company produces turned parts on a variety of old cam autos.
But when founding partner Bob Crew retired a couple of years ago, the cam autos effectively retired too.
"Investment in more modern CNC turning was desperately needed," he says.
To start the process of updating, Timothy Bittleston wanted to replace Crew and Saunders' old EMI-MEC lathe.
So off he went round the country looking at second-hand CNC machines.
"We had had a Colchester at school and there was an old manual Colchester Triumph 2000 here.
So I knew reliability was good and spares were easy.
I wanted back-up in English; I wanted to buy British and I also wanted a machine with a small footprint.
Some of the foreign machines I saw were very space hungry while the Colchester is very compact.
He then talks about value for money with the Tornado 110.
"It's a modern two-axis slant bed CNC machine built in 1998, offers a lot of machine for the price, has a good specification and a Fanuc CNC control which I wanted," he says.
So pooling his savings and his wages from Crew and Saunders and with a bit of help from mum and dad, Timothy Bittleston bought his CNC lathe last November.
"I live at home so my outgoings are very low and up till then, my parents had been very sympathetic.
Basically, they said: "You'd only be at university spending our money anyway." The Tornado is now proudly installed at Crew and Saunders where Timothy Bittleston operates it as a separate company, Bittleston Ltd., until he and they can agree terms on transferring Crew and Saunders to him when the gov' nor, Ian Saunders retires at 70 which should be in a couple of years time.
He now performs all the CNC turning on the Tornado 110 and some CNC milling on an old Bridgeport.
At the moment he is having to create part programs manually on the Tornado, but hopes to improve his efficiency and buy an off-line programming software package.
He says he's got his eye on the Colchester CAM package that recently became available.
So how does Timothy Bittleston explain his early enthusiasm for engineering? When he was young, he says, his father was a research scientist for GEC Hirst, and was always leaving bits of robots lying around at home.
"There are also several generations of clock makers in our family, so I reckon the genes still work!" But not content with cutting metal at home, he also "re-opened" the school metalwork shop.
"It was hardly ever used; and the lathes were locked up.
But I found the key and started turning jobs out at school.
I'm not sure whether they officially knew about it, but I had one sympathetic teacher who taught graphics but had been a metalwork teacher and he tended to keep an eye on me." He follows on to describe: "The only trouble was that I'd be doing my homework while working in the shed and all my books tended to get covered in oil.
The teachers often complained that they had to mark all my books at school because they were too dirty to take home!" While in the shed he taught himself how to use the machines.
"The people at the engineering society were very helpful.
But, as you do, you read the manuals and push the buttons to see what happens," he said.
He even learnt about CNC on the old Bridgeport at Crew and Saunders.
"I took two days to write my first four line program!" He originally wanted to go to college to do an NVQ in engineering but didn't think much of the courses.
"They taught you how to switch machines on; it would have been a long time before I got to do some real CNC machining.
But I had been through work experience at Crew and Saunders and asked them if they had a job while I decided what I wanted to do.
Basically they didn't know what they were going to do with the place once the governors retired.
But if I wanted to run an engineering shop, then maybe this was the opportunity.
So I said I'd love to give it a try." He knew some reinvestment was required and had been saving up and then went looking for the CNC lathe.
"The Colchester is an excellent machine.
It's flexible, easy to program for short runs and when I approached the application engineers at the Colchester factory in Heckmondwike they were very helpful, even though I was young and only had a secondhand machine.
They showed me how to run it a lot faster! The feeds and speeds I was using were for a manual centre lathe and although I had wanged them up as much as I dared, they showed me how to wang them up even more! It was great!" And where next? "I'm working hard to get my money back on the Tornado first," he says.
"But I'm not dreaming.
I'm going to have one of those new Colchester Tornado three-axis lathes with driven tooling as soon as I can afford it and then a machining centre!" And for the future? "One day I'll be running a multi-million pound engineering company.
I haven't spent all this time building my life around making things for nothing!".
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