“Dugard provide an excellent service and offer solutions to engineers accross the board”

In 2010 Eric Shortland took the plunge and bought Mutad Engineering. At this point the company was flagging and had little ambition but today it has turned the corner and is almost unrecognisable from the company it once was.

Having previously worked for Aqua Hydraulics, Eric saw an opportunity in Mutad Engineering and knew he could make it work. From starting out with just four employees, Eric now has eight members of staff and has moved the company into the 21st century by ditching the old style manual machine tools and replacing them with five sophisticated Dugard CNC machines.

Eric said ‘ Dugard have been a real help to this business whilst going through such a transition.  We have invested in five new and used CNC machines from Dugard over the last three years including two Dugard Eagle 1000’s, one Leadwell GT Lathe a used Mazak VMC and a new Dugard HD BT 50 machining centre.

Mutad Engineering is a specialist engineering company that offers customers and prospects a reliable, responsive sub-contract machining service. A lot of their expertise is machining difficult materials for the automotive industry.

‘We’ve found a real niche in machining difficult materials that other sub-contract machine shops would rather avoid. These include duplex, super duplex and Inconel – all for the oil and gas industry. This type of work was the reason we chose to invest further in a new Dugard BT50 machine. The HD machine offers us extreme rigidity and power when removing harder materials and in addition the Y axis on the machine is over 600mm which helps as some of the larger parts are 600mm wide’

‘The new HD machine also came equipped with a 4th axis unit, this just added to our capacity and gave us that bit more flexibility to offer our customers. I was always comfortable with Dugard as a supplier as I had experience of them in my previous company. They provide an excellent service and really do offer solutions to engineers across the board, whether it’s a used machine or a new one, Dugard will always be happy to help’