Ecurie restores productivity with HAAS

As a company that solely specialises in the restoration of pre-war Aston Martin’s, Ecurie Bertelli certainly has a niche audience. To move the company forward, it has recently purchased a TM 2P 3-axis machining centre from HAAS Automation UK.

MTDCNC visited Ecurie Bertelli in Olney where Robert Blakemore gave MTD more background on this fascinating company. Robert told us: “The company was initially set up by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason in 1976 under a different name and has since been passed through a few sets of hands down the years – always specialising in Aston Martin’s built before the war. Aston Martin started as Bamford & Martin and they produced a side valve car in very limited numbers. They managed to produce about 60 before they, unfortunately, went bankrupt. Then Bert Bertelli bought the business to carry on the very same ethos of lightweight racing cars. They did obviously make cars to sell as well, but the total number they built was around 681 with around 450 left. So, we are left with less than half of one percent of these Aston Martin’s ever built in this era.”

“Predominantly the cars have always been about competition, racing, rallying and trials that were a big thing pre-war. The ethos has always been around lightweight cars built for speed and reliability. The cars are still expected to drive to Le Mans, race for 24 hours and then drive home.”

Looking closer at the restoration and manufacturing of parts for the cars at the Buckinghamshire business, Robert continues: “Aston Martin made the majority of the parts themselves, so there is very little commonality between different types. We are fortunate that we have a massive archive of thousands of original 2D works drawings. We have been using those drawings to manufacture the parts on manual machines for decades. We have switched to digital manufacturing and CNC machining in the last 12 to 18 months.”

Referring to the relationship that Ecurie Bertelli now has with HAAS, Robert says: “It all started with a conversation with the person that runs the UK division of HAAS who kindly sent an engineer here to assess what we were doing. We then worked with HAAS to choose a machine. This was subsequently installed and we were trained to use the new machine.”

Regarding the transition to CNC machining, Robert says: “It has certainly been successful, but not without challenges – but we have been very well supported. We are now seeing the speed of which we can make parts improve, and the overall accuracy is much better as well. Repeatability also plays a large part. The traditional purchase of a CNC machine is, as I understand, likely to do a batch of parts and move onto the next job. We are entirely different in the way that we approach things. We run very small batches of maybe 10 or 20 components, but we know that we will be repeating that next year, the year after and so on. This will continue for as long as this business persists. So, for us it’s that repeatability over time that is really key.”

Looking to the future, Robert concludes: “We absolutely see our relationship with HAAS continuing. We are now assessing our requirements for improving the tooling that we have got. We have a machining centre at the moment but we are actively looking at a turning centre to complement that. Hopefully, as we keep switching more parts to digital and CNC, we will continue to make sure that we have the right tools for the job.”