Upgrade of the Savage Lathe
The Savage Lathe is quite a "beast" and is used to produce our larger insulators. It required a highly skilled and technically competent operator to "drive" it. With simultaneous use of a hand controlled wheel and lever for vertical and horizontal movement, it was physically demanding to work.
In late 2025, our engineers from Duncan Engineering, electrician from Morris Waddel Electrical and Brent from Tui Technolgy all came together to convert the Savage to a CNC enabled machine, with the results exceeding our expectations.
You can watch some of an insulators being turned on the new lathe below, with the changeover detailed in the following pictures.
Evan manually controls the Savage Lathe to turn 110kV Insulators
Firstly excess items were stripped off, including the manual lever and wheel
Due to the size of the lathe, scaffolding was required
Many hours of work started with enlarging the safety fencing and adding the new drive unit
A new loading gantry was added and the machine was prepared for spray painting
Spray Painting
Looking resplendent in it's new colour scheme
Connector for the electrical controls
Toolchanger added
Myriad of control wires and air lines
The 'Brains" arrived fully built up for us by Tui Technology
Delicate work to get the control box onto the wall
Control box in place
The electrician then had to join all of the connections
Pretty much ready to go - just some programming to make everything talk the same language
Loading the first blank
Ready to go
Success! -The first blank being turned - some slight changes were required to the profile