Bath & Portland buy Omag CNC

Hanson Bath & Portland Stone have bought a new Omag CNC profiler as part of a major upgrade and re-organisation of their masonry works in Portland, Dorset.

The new £160,000 Italian machine requires a specialist computer operator to programme it and follows designs which are down-loaded from a computer disk.

Masonry works manager Neil Fuller believes the Omag is setting the scene for the way ahead. He says: "This is the way the industry is going now. We are going through the process of gradually replacing some of our older machinery and this profiler is very efficient - completing more work in less time and with more safety features built in."

Bath & Portland have employed an operator specifically to run the machine. He is Pete Binnie, who trained as a traditional engineer but moved to computer engineering when he realised that was the way ahead.

"The new machines are cleaner, more efficient and safer to work with - the industry moves on and you have to move with it," he says.