Redex Gear Center: Innovation and design for OEMs

Redex has invested more than 20 million Euros upgrading the company's industrial organisation to the most modern levels. The company's second French plant (Senonches) has been transformed into an innovative gear facility in the fields of cutting, finishing, and 3D control (cylindrical gear, straight or helical and spiro-conics).

The production methods used there are innovative for industrial gearbox producers (for instance, HP-GS hard cutting of spiro-conics or superfinishing of inner teeth). Ultramodern machines utilised worldwide, despite their full digital control of multiple CNC axes, do not operate at optimal levels without the tools and production methods developed specifically by Redex.

With 65 years of experience in top-quality planetary gearbox design, Redex engineers are able to provide the company's specific added value through these tool designs. This vital additional input for the running of the machines accounts for up to 40 per cent of the global investment costs. The workshops receiving such advanced machine tools are fully air-conditioned to work almost as "clean rooms". The high-tech environment sees the industrial processing of gears, where the required accuracy is almost always in the micron magnitude.

These top-quality gears are mounted in the very core of planetary reducers and advanced gearboxes fitted with the most modern machine-tools (built by renowned OEMs such as DMG, Mazak, Mitsubishi), with Redex as a key supplier.

The quality in the finishing of the gears is not just a theoretical target for engineers, but rather an integral component in the constant improvement of industrial drives. Redex offers machine builders better efficiency, lower noise level, longer lifetime and makes innovation and new design more risk free than ever.

Redex's Gear Center has been developed in less than 5 years by drawing upon the internal resources of the Redex group as well as the centres of excellence in mechanical training of the INSA of Lyon and Rouen. Automation, flow management, and operating methods complete the range of techniques used in the factory, measuring more than 5000m2, employing 50 highly skilled engineers and technicians, and carrying out a trade volume of nearly 10 million Euros. Since 2012, the Senonches Gear Center, in addition to the internal Redex group, has developed subcontracted trade at high added value for the aeronautical sector.

To find out more about Redex's centre of gear excellence, please go to www.andantex.co.uk.