Erodex UK appoints new Engineering Director

Leading Aerospace supplier Erodex UK has announced the appointment of Damian Ward as its new Engineering Director.

Ward has more than 20 years’ experience providing tooling and engineering solutions within the Aerospace industry and joins from Matrix Tooling Solutions, where he was Business Development Manager. Prior to this, he held the role of Aerospace Business Manager at SECO Tools.

Within his role as Engineering Director, Ward will be responsible for engineering operations at the company’s West Midlands based graphite machining facility, driving efficiency gains and reducing cost by implementing engineering best practice via the latest tooling, workholding, cutting strategies, software and techniques.

“Erodex are the UK’s leading supplier of graphites, EDM consumables and state of the art graphite machining to the UK Aerospace industry, with a very capable and experienced engineering team. I see further developing the engineering operations as a really exciting opportunity” Ward stated. “We have a fantastic team, have benefited from continued investment in state of the art 5 axis CNC machinery and have a clear direction for investment moving forward”.

Erodex UK is a specialist with niche expertise in graphites and graphite machining for the Aerospace industry. Ward’s introduction follows the previous appointment of James Kirk in 2019 as Group Operations Director, with the two now working closely to further implement the company’s continuous improvement programme.

Erodex Director Steve Rolinson adds: “These are exciting times for Erodex. Our goal is to expand and increase our presence within emerging overseas markets such as Latin America. By increasing engineering efficiencies, we can be more competitive in these markets whilst reinforcing our market leading position within the UK Aerospace sector.

“We are delighted to welcome Damian to the company and look forward to seeing the benefit that his wealth of tooling and engineering expertise will bring”.

Ward – who started his career as an apprentice engineering technician at BAE systems and completed his apprenticeship as a CNC machinist at Derby based Slack & Parr Ltd – has a successful track record of working with aerospace engineering firms to implement tooling and engineering efficiency improvements from his time at SECO and Matrix Tools.

The opportunity to build on this as Director of Engineering at Erodex, whilst exploring the potential that automation can bring, is something that he is particularly looking forward to.

“I have always been a big believer that to deliver the best results you have to have a passion for something. I am passionate about engineering efficiency and finding the best way to make things. Further down the line, we will be looking at automating production for some of our high volume products, including paletting and potentially robotics. Exploring this and the value that it can add here at Erodex is something that I am really looking forward to leading on”.