What is your main role within moveero?

My main responsibility is designing and developing wheels to meet our customers’ specific requirements. Although most of this work involves designing multipiece wheels, I do also work with our OEM customers in the agriculture sector too as required.

What does a typical day look like?

Probably like most of my colleagues in the engineering team, there really is no such thing as a typical day. Each one is made up of lots of different jobs, ranging from working on 3D and 2D wheel designs, to responding to technical and design queries from colleagues in production, planning, quality control or sales, and meeting with customers to discuss their wheel requirements. The variety is one of the things that I like most about my role, and although I have the day broadly mapped out when I arrive at work, it really can spin off in any number of different directions.

Are you working on any major projects at the moment?

The biggest single project I’m working on revolves around ETRTO, the organisation of European tire manufacturers, which aims to align national tire standards and ultimately to make tires, rims and valves interchangeable in terms of fitting and use, with common load and pressure characteristics.

Many of our European customers require their wheels to fully comply with ETRTO standards and so it is important that we meet their needs. I closely monitor the standards and assess any changes or updates for their potential impact on our product range. For example, last year the standard for five part multi-piece wheels was updated for industrial rims by ETRTO, meaning that we designed new flanges for a number of our wheels to comply with their newrequirements.

Among your achievements, is there one thing in particular that you’re most proud of?

Looking back, I would say that the HIF (hot induction forming) project is the one that really stands out, as it represented a real step change in technology, enabling us to develop and launch a completely new, multi-piece, high performance, patented wheel. The Infini-Forge wheel is manufactured using this revolutionary process, which enables us to achieve greatermanufacturing accuracy and so produce wheels specifically for high load-bearing vehicles. For example, AGVs in container ports and airport tractors. The technical advancements hasallowed us to manufacture wheels with a 50% lifespan longer than conventionally manufactured, multi-piece wheels.

In the early stages of the project though, we had some difficulties with the positioning of the center band when we started to heat up the metal, which meant that we were unable to achieve the tight tolerances required. Through close analysis, we prepared new detailed design drawings and process instructions, and were able to rectify the issue and produceInfini-Forge with the necessary quality, performance and tolerance levels.

What changes do you think the next five years will bring?

We already work really closely with our customers and in particular their engineering teams, but I believe these ties will get even closer over the coming years, with truly integrated teams adopting a ‘one team’ approach, to address the evolving requirements of our customers and the markets they operate in.