RT Quaife Engineering Ltd have a long and illustrious heritage. The business was created in 1965 by Rod Quaife, initially operating from a small workshop near Penshurst in Kent to produce close ratio five-speed gearkits for Norton and Triumph motorcycles.
As the business flourished it relocated to larger premises at Tonbridge. In the meantime, the pedigree of Quaife's products was being proven with victories at the prestigious Daytona Speedway and the Isle of Man TT.
Now located at much larger premises in Sevenoaks, the company is currently celebrating their 50th anniversary, and are now the undisputed leaders in the field of high performance drivetrain and steering rack components.
The company count automotive manufacturers of the calibre of Morgan, Caterham, Mclaren and Lotus amongst their high profile customers, supplying high quality products such as wheel uprights and steering racks.
Although Quaife now direct their business more towards the nonprofessional motor sports market, their precision engineered products have been favoured in many levels of motorsports, including Formula 1, whilst their patented ATB (Automatic Torque Biasing) differential was specified by Ford for the Focus RS Mark I and II, as well as Daimler-Chrysler and GM vehicles and is now in great demand from Rally drivers and historic motor sport enthusiasts around the world.
Occupying a combined floor area of 40,000 sqft across their two sites in Sevenoaks and Gillingham and employing 80 people, the company now design and manufacture a large and diverse range of high performance drive train products.
Many of the precision engineered components produced by Quaife originate from round steel bar which requires sawing to length prior to the machining process. The company have for a number of years successfully made use of a bandsaw supplied by Prosaw for this purpose, so when the time came to upgrade the sawing facility, they naturally turned to Prosaw.
Quaife produce a wide variety of components where small batch sizes are a normal requirement, so a LX250AE fully automatic bandsaw, featuring variable speeds, length encoder and an integral touch screen was chosen in order to easily and quickly control the frequent changes needed to the cutting criteria in order to produce the company's extensive range of drive train components.
