We came to produce our nutrunner by chance, essentially to assist our client – a leading German company for tightening tools – and have gone on to develop a niche position in the market.

The customer needs

This company is a specialist manufacturer of high torque nutrunners, but they occasionally have customers asking for a nutrunner with a lower torque or requiring certain alterations for use in different applications. Prior to their association with Modec, the company wasn’t in a position to provide this service and would find themselves having to suggest a competitor, running the risk of potentially losing the client’s business. 

Today, if they don’t have a solution within their product range to meet a customer’s requirements, they come to us – we find a solution and they keep their customers.

The Modec experience

By default, many businesses have been using nutrunners, which are essentially a tool, as a motor for their machines. The difference with the Modec ‘nutrunner motor’ is that we offer an actual motor to do the same job and we can adapt our nutrunner motor to fit the specific requirements of our clients’ machines, which is how we were able to help our German customer.

In functional terms, pneumatic motors are better than electric motors for carrying out the role of a nutrunner which is to tighten or loosen a nut bolt.

Why air motors are better than electric motors for carrying out the role of a nutrunner?

Because the process involves the motor to reach its stall torque, and if you regularly stall an electric motor it won’t last long except if it is oversized! The automobile industry prefers electric motor nutrunners for the simple reason that they facilitate the task of logging the date and time of interventions, but for use in other industries, such as wind turbines and notably when a very high torque is required, air motors are nearly always the better choice.

The Modec solution

In the nutrunner market, we position ourselves as niche suppliers listening and responding to clients’ specific needs. If you need a right-angled pneumatic nutrunner, or a nutrunner with a specially fitted crow foot, or need to be able to operate in a very tight space, our technical team at Modec will find a solution. For example, we recently sold a bespoke nutrunner to a company in Italy which assembles train chassis (known as bogies) and were experiencing difficulty accessing all the bolts.

Another application that poses difficulties for standard nutrunners is the maintenance and repair of motorway safety barriers due to the underside positioning of the nut bolts and the limited work space.

We like to work direct with our customers’ design teams to fully understand their needs and provide a fast turnaround – we can produce a prototype, test it and sign it off, all within a few days. It’s a hands-on service that works for us, and our clients seem to appreciate it too.

If you want to know more about our expertise and solutions, don't hesitate to download our case studies !