ANCA celebrates 50 years in business

The Boland family.

Australia-based ANCA has been building CNC tool and cutter grinders for 50 years, selling more than 10,000 5-axis CNC machines to over 2,500 customers. Around 1.1 billion tools have been created using the company’s grinders.

“You would be very unlikely to find any bit of advanced equipment anywhere in the world that hasn’t been touched by a cutting tool which has been manufactured on one of our machines,” said co-founder Pat Boland.

Boland and Pat McCluskey–then an electrical engineer and an industrial electronics tradesman–met at a government-owned munitions factory in Melbourne in 1968. The two Pats started the company in 1974 in a spare room at Boland and wife Libby’s home.

“It wasn’t about money in the beginning, and for me it’s not about money now. I get my kicks out of designing new machines,” said McCluskey. “Even before we started ANCA, Pat and I have always been driven by simply wanting to get machines to do things better. My enduring philosophy in business is if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. New ideas and new thinking are the basis of our business.”

The ANCA Group also makes associated equipment and software, including robot arms, software, and control systems, and offers automation services and technology to OEM machine builders.

To mark its 50th anniversary, the company is hosting a series of open houses, seminars, and events and is attending tradeshows worldwide.

ANCA’s U.S. open house will take place May 7-8 at its Wixom, Mich., headquarters.