Whitcher CNC Ltd on their Dugard ECO machines – ideal for steel, U-drilling, hogging and profiling

Whitcher CNC Limited was founded by Peter Whitcher in 2008, just at the start of the recession.

Having worked within an engineering business before, Peter took on this ambitious new venture that after a difficult first year has grown from strength to strength into a very successful and competitive engineering company.

The company machines parts for a variety of market sectors including surveillance, microchip and electronics.  Now 4 years on it boasts 7 high performance CNC machines including horizontal machining centres, vertical machining centres and CNC lathes, bought both new and second-hand.  As with many engineering companies there is a great variance in the materials that Whitcher’s machine shop has to handle on a regular basis ranging from aluminium to varying grades of steels.  More recently the company has seen a significant increase in more demanding jobs in harder materials from their customers.

With a renewed focus on CNC milling Stainless 316 Duplex and Tool steel successfully it was necessary for Peter to explore and find a machining centre that could cope with new reliable machining processes on more demanding components.  The business already had a DMG machining centre, which was great for high speed aluminium machining but not ideal for hogging steel. Peter therefore approached Dugard, who introduced them to the ECO 1000 machining centre. Peter quickly witnessed first-hand the steel cutting ability and overall high performance of this machine, this was enough evidence for him to go ahead and place an order.

When speaking of Dugard’s machining centres, Peter said “Dugard’s Eco 1000 machining centre is ideal; the machine is great for U drilling, roughing out and finishing on stainless steels and tougher materials. We now have our DMG machining centre for high speed aluminium machining and our Dugard ECO machine for the more demanding machining requirements.”  The company has since purchased two ECO vertical machining centres from Dugard, both with Siemens controls to keep compatibility within the workshop.  When asked about Dugard’s service Peter said, “The honest answer is I don’t know, the machines have been that reliable that we haven’t needed to call them.  Will we buy another?  Absolutely!”