Working in the high-speed, high-pressure, environment of motorsport, West Sussex-based Nova Racing Transmissions is constantly working to tight deadlines.

With customers ranging from teams in the World and British Superbike championships, down to club-level racers, producing parts on-time is vital. For this reason, the company has turned to tooling partner Ceratizit UK & Ireland and its WNT brand to deliver improved performance across its machining activities, particularly in the manufacture of gear selector forks.
The most recent development was the introduction of WNT’s ZSG4 centric vices, along with its MNG zero-point location system (pictured), which is used on the bed of the company’s new XYZ 710 VMC HD and on the 4th-axis unit on the machine. As a result, an on-machine flowline has been created that delivers one complete selector fork every cycle from a raw billet. This new process delivers both time savings, with set-up times halved, as well as improved quality and consistency.
“Prior to the adoption of the MNG zero point and ZSG vices we used conventional vices to hold cumbersome fixtures,” says manager Daniel Vaughan. “However, we can now grip on just 3 mm of raw billet, machine one face completely, transfer the part to the 4th axis to machine a location pin, before finish machining the second face [gripped in aluminium jaws that match the shape of the selector fork],” says Daniel Vaughan, manager, Nova Racing Transmissions. “In addition, we are seeing improved surface finish and consistency of parts, with repeatability of between 2-3 µm from fork-to-fork.”
Nova Racing Transmissions’ partnership with Ceratizit is a two-way street, with Nova supplying gearboxes and gear ratios to Sam Burman and her WNT Burman Racing MOTO 3 GP team, which she races in the British Motostar Championship.
For further information www.ceratizit.com