Late October 2013, Van Wees joined forces with control systems specialist, Eltra Engineering in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Henk Klijn, director at Eltra engineering BV and Rien van den Aker have worked together nearly 20 years on the development of UD and Crossply machines. Eltra has been a reliable partner for van Wees and the open mindedness of the company has led to many innovative solutions. To mention one, the Crossply machines are equipped with camera systems controlling the position of individual UD yarns. By choosing different light sources, critical selection of the camera and software tuning, this challenge has been solved and it is used on multiple machines in the (ballistics) market.
RvdA: “The cooperation between Van Wees and Eltra began to feel like a symbiosis and to join forces in building and developing solutions for the composite industry is a logical step. Eltra and van Wees will be working together even more as a team. The production will be streamlined and response time will be shortened due to the larger resource of the combined manpower. The investment in van Wees is done by the owners of the company, Eltra and Van Wees will remain separate companies as they have been”.
Henk Klijn will take over the day to day management of the company and Rien van den Aker will concentrate on sales and Research and Development of the machines for the automation of composite processes. This will lead to even more interesting developments in UD and Crossply technology in the future.