Welcome To Our New Engineering Manager, Carl Buddery

‘After graduating in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sheffield, I started my career in composite bearing materials in 2001 and it is an industry I have spent the majority of almost twenty-two years working in.

For the first part of my career, I worked my way from a Product Engineer knowing almost nothing about composites or bearings through Technical Manager and up to Engineering Director. After over seventeen years I then had a refreshing change of scenery in the rail industry for four years, before finding my way back to composites recently here at Tufcot.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work in various positions and have experience company-wide at the places I have worked, giving me a good overview and appreciation of how companies function, but my main involvement and interest has always been the technical and engineering side. This has been a mix of managing sales and engineering teams, providing quotations, offering technical advice and support to customers and partners, problem-solving, involvement with manufacturing techniques, writing technical manuals, recommending materials and solutions to a wide range of applications, bearing design and large project participation. All of this I try to carry out with a customer focussed, friendly approach.

Over the years I have worked on everything from small diameter bushings for relatively simple machinery to larger bearings forming part of major renewal projects in marine, naval and hydropower industries with multiple components and third parties, and I’ve been able to visit customers and partners in many different countries.

In addition to technical knowledge, I also have experience in business development, supporting customers worldwide through training, joint visits, exhibitions, presentations, and hosting visitors to our premises. Helping our customers and end users to adopt and embrace composite bearings requires more than just technical know-how.

With composite bearings, the work is always interesting and constantly evolving. As well as the traditional and well-established applications for composite bearings, it is amazing how many new applications we find for these materials, the size and complexity of the bearings we can manufacture and how far we can develop and push the materials’

Carl Buddery, Engineering Manager