Roger Moss spent over thirty years in the Special Purpose machine tools industry as part of the Leicester company ‘Moss Machine Tools’ , with customers in the Automotive, Aerospace, Defence and domestic appliance sectors.

The family company, started by his father Frederick Moss in 1946, was internationally renowned for its insights into new manufacturing solutions and the very high quality of its products.

Its work with Rolls Royce in the 1980’s to develop jet engine blade manufacturing technology was considered by their project manager to be central to the success that led to Rolls Royce winning the Queens award for innovation in 1989.

Moss Machine Tools was a victim of the decline in Manufacturing Industry, and finally closed its doors in 1991, not before manufacturing one of the most innovative special purpose machine tools that was created at the time for Ford Motor company.

Roger was cited by many as having been central to the success of Moss Machine Tools, and in his roles of Works Manager and Technical Director he was able to go some way to bring the realities of the shop floor metal cutting experience into the drawing office, to achieve designs that were both ground breaking and elegant in their simplicity.

I started with the company in 1988 and worked as an apprentice until the company closed. I then went on to work with Roger at Moss Engineering, based in a small but well appointed tool-room based workshop he built.