CNC Brand Profile

Romi: The Machine Tool Builder That Also Built the Country's First Car

In 1930, a young man named Américo Emílio Romi opened a garage in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, a town in the interior of São Paulo state, and called it Garage Santa Bárbara. He fixed cars. There was no machine tool industry in Brazil to speak of, because there did not need to be. Everything came in on a ship. If you wanted a lathe you bought an American one or a German one, and if it broke you waited.

This is a brand profile, not a spec sheet. What that repair shop turned into over the next fifteen years is one of the more remarkable sequences in the history of this trade, and the decisions made in it still explain why a Romi lathe is built the way it is today. Here is where the company came from, why it owns its own foundries, what it actually builds now, how it compares to the machines you would cross-shop, and what to look at when you buy one used.

Building the Capability, in Order

Read the early timeline and you are watching somebody solve a bootstrapping problem in public. The foundry came first, in 1934. Before the machines, before the product line, before there was anything to sell, Romi built the ability to pour iron. In 1938 the company was renamed Máquinas Agrícolas Romi and was making agricultural machinery. Then in 1940 it built table planers, and the reason it built table planers is the reason this story is worth telling: it needed them to machine the beds of the lathes it intended to build. Tools to make the tools.

The first machine tools shipped in 1941 under the Imor brand, starting with the TP-5 lathe. What happened next was not gradual. Romi built 300 machines in 1942, 1,000 in 1943, and 1,700 in 1944. In that same year it made its first export shipment, to Argentina, and moved into a 12,000 square metre plant. A wartime world had stopped shipping capital equipment to Brazil, the country needed lathes, and a repair shop in the interior of São Paulo had spent the previous decade quietly assembling the capability to make them.

Most machine tool companies start with a machine and add a foundry later, if ever. Romi started with the foundry and worked forward. Ninety years on, that order is still the company's structural advantage, because Romi pours the iron its machines are made of.

The Tractor and the Car

In 1948 Romi built the Toro, the first tractor manufactured in Brazil. That alone would be a decent footnote. Then in 1955 the company announced it would build a car, and in 1956 it delivered the Romi-Isetta, produced under license from Iso of Italy, the first automobile manufactured in Brazil. It stayed in production until 1961.

A machine tool builder producing the first car in a country of fifty million people sounds like a detour. It is actually the same story continued. A company that had already built its own foundry, its own planers, its own lathes and its own tractor was, by the mid-1950s, one of the only organizations in Brazil that could physically make a car. Romi restructured as ROMI S.A. in 1962, expanded to the city of São Paulo in 1966, established Rominor in Recife in 1967, and installed one of the first computers in the country in 1968. The company kept doing the thing nobody else in Brazil could do yet.

Why the Foundry Still Matters

Romi today runs 13 factory units, 11 in Brazil and 2 in Germany, across more than 170,000 square metres of built area. The breakdown is worth reading slowly: five final assembly plants, three machining facilities, two sheet metal operations, one electronic panel assembly plant, and two foundries. Annual capacity is roughly 2,900 industrial machines and 50,000 tons of cast parts.

Fifty thousand tons of castings against 2,900 machines means Romi pours far more iron than its own machines consume, and sells cast and machined parts as a business line in its own right. For a buyer, the relevant part is what it means for the machine under you. Castings are where rigidity, damping and thermal behavior come from in a lathe, and a builder that owns the foundry controls iron chemistry, section thickness, aging and the whole quality chain rather than negotiating it with a supplier. Very few machine tool companies anywhere can say that. It traces directly back to 1934.

Buying a 138-Year-Old German Builder

In January 2012 Romi completed the acquisition of Burkhardt+Weber Fertigungssysteme of Reutlingen, in Baden-Württemberg, for 20.5 million euros paid out of its own resources. Burkhardt+Weber was founded in 1888 and builds large horizontal machining centers and 4 and 5 axis machines for special applications, serving commercial vehicles, aviation and energy. Those are the two German plants in Romi's count.

The inversion is the interesting part. A company founded in 1930 in a country that imported all its machine tools, that got started by building the machines it could not buy from Europe, now owns a German builder older than itself and sells that iron as its premium line. Ninety years is a long enough run to close a circle.

The Lineup in Shop Language

Romi splits into three businesses: machine tools, plastic processing machinery for injection and blow molding, and cast iron and nodular iron castings. On the machine tool side the families sort out cleanly.

C series, heavy duty flat bed lathes. The backbone of the brand and the descendant of that 1941 TP-5. Flat bed, heavy castings, big swing and length, and the format most associated with the name. Available as manual machines and as manual and CNC hybrids, which is a category almost nobody else still commits to.

T and M series, CNC turning centers. The conventional slant bed production turning machines, competing directly with the Japanese and Korean builders.

VT series, vertical turning lathes. For large diameter, heavy, awkward parts where the work sits on a table instead of hanging off a chuck.

D series, vertical machining centers. Plus, through Burkhardt+Weber, large horizontals and special-application 4 and 5 axis machines at the top of the range. Romi also lists hybrid additive machines in its North American offering.

The Manual and CNC Hybrid, and Why It Survives

The hybrid flat bed lathe is the machine most worth understanding about this brand, because it answers a question the industry mostly stopped asking. A hybrid is a real manual lathe, with handwheels and an apron you can run by feel, that also carries CNC capability for the work that deserves it. Turn a one-off repair part by hand in the morning, run a program on a short batch in the afternoon, on the same machine, without a fixture or a post processor between you and the job.

That combination is exactly right for a maintenance department, a repair shop, a prototype room, an oil field service outfit or a training program, and it is exactly wrong for a production cell. Most builders abandoned the format because production shops do not want it. Romi kept building it because the shops that do want it have very few places left to go. If you have ever watched a good machinist single-point a thread by hand on a part nobody has a drawing for, you understand why the machine still sells.

U.S. Presence and Support

Romi Machine Tools Ltd operates the North American business out of Erlanger, Kentucky, offering presales and aftersales engineering, technical assistance and spare parts. The company has been exporting since 1944 and maintains trading and service subsidiaries in the United States, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, France and Mexico, with distributors on every continent.

The honest read for a buyer: this is a real North American presence, and it is not the size of Mazak's or Haas's. Romi is a large company globally and a smaller name in an American shop, which shows up as fewer local service technicians and a thinner installed base to trade notes with. On a manual or hybrid flat bed lathe that matters less than it would on a complex multi-tasking machine, because there is less to go wrong that a competent maintenance person cannot address. Weigh it accordingly against the machine you are looking at.

How Romi Compares

Each makes a different argument. Weiler is the direct comparison on manual and hybrid turning and generally costs more. Okuma is the answer if the job is production turning under a proprietary control with thermal stability as the pitch, and it is a different machine for a different shop. Burkhardt+Weber sits at the top of Romi's own range rather than against it. Romi's argument is value and iron: a heavy, well-cast lathe from a builder that controls its castings, in formats including one the rest of the industry walked away from.

Why a Used Romi Holds Value

Flat bed lathes hold value for the same reason they always have. The machine is heavy, the geometry is in the castings, and the castings do not wear out. What wears is ways, screws, bearings and the electrics, and all of those are serviceable on a machine simple enough to be worth servicing. A manual or hybrid Romi with tight ways and a good spindle is a useful machine for decades, and the used market for that format is thin on supply because so few builders still make them.

The specific case for Romi is the iron, the size range, and the fact that a shop needing a big manual or hybrid flat bed lathe has a short list of options. The constraints are two. The North American installed base is smaller than the Japanese majors, so parts and technical support need to be checked rather than assumed, and CNC-equipped machines should be evaluated on their control generation, since a control that is no longer supported is the one part of a simple machine that can genuinely strand you. A near-new machine like a 2024 C-470 sits outside most of this, because there is no wear to discount and the control is current.

What to Check When Buying a Used Romi

These are the inspections Resell CNC handles before a lathe moves, and they apply to any flat bed machine you are looking at.

Bed wear at the headstock end. Nearly all the work happens in the first eighteen inches, and that is where the ways wear first. Check for a step or a hollow near the chuck and compare it to the far end of the bed, which is usually near new.

Spindle runout and bearing condition. Indicate the spindle nose and the bore. Run it up through the speed range and listen at the top. On a heavy lathe the spindle is the most expensive thing to put right.

Carriage and cross slide fit. Check gib adjustment and look for play at both ends of travel. Excess backlash in the cross slide screw is normal wear and fixable, a rocking carriage on worn ways is not.

Tailstock alignment. Bring it up to a center in the spindle and check that it lines up in both planes. A tailstock that has been dropped or pried on will chase you forever on long work.

Leadscrew and thread chasing. On a manual or hybrid machine, cut a test thread if you can. The threading capability is a large part of why anyone buys this format and it depends on the leadscrew, half nuts and the gearbox all being right.

Apron and feed gearbox. Engage every feed rate and every threading position. These are the controls a manual operator uses constantly and they show neglect faster than anything else on the machine.

Control generation and support, on CNC and hybrid machines. Identify the control, confirm it boots cold, pull the alarm history, and get parameters backed up. Then confirm the control is still supported before you buy, because that is the one modern part of an otherwise simple machine.

Chuck, steady rest and tooling. Ask exactly what comes with it. Chucks, faceplates, steady and follow rests, toolposts and a tailstock set are a meaningful fraction of the value of a big lathe and are routinely left out of the conversation.

Coolant, chip handling and the general story the machine tells. Look in the coolant tank and under the chip pan. A shop that maintained those maintained everything else.

Documentation and electrical. Confirm manuals and wiring diagrams exist, and check that the machine is wired for your plant voltage. On an imported machine that is not a given.

Who Runs Romi Machines

Maintenance and repair departments inside larger plants, where somebody has to make a part today that does not exist anywhere. Oil field and energy service shops turning long, heavy work. Shipyards and rail shops. General job shops that need one big lathe that can do anything rather than three that each do one thing. Trade schools and apprenticeship programs, where a hybrid lets a student learn to cut metal by hand and then learn to program the same machine. Prototype and R&D rooms. Across all of them the common requirement is versatility over cycle time, which is a different buyer from the one shopping a production turning center.

Resell CNC Take

The manual and CNC hybrid is a category most of this industry declared dead, and every year we get calls from shops that need one and cannot find it. Maintenance departments, oil country service outfits, schools. They do not want a production turning center and they cannot use a bare manual lathe either. Romi is one of the few builders still serving that buyer, and because the format is scarce, clean examples move faster than the spec sheet would suggest. If you need one, buy it when you see it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Romi known for?

Romi is a Brazilian machine tool builder founded in 1930 in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, São Paulo, best known for heavy duty flat bed lathes and manual and CNC hybrid turning machines, alongside CNC turning centers, vertical turning lathes and vertical machining centers. It is one of very few machine tool companies that owns its own foundries, running two of them across 13 plants and producing roughly 50,000 tons of castings a year. It also built the first tractor and the first automobile manufactured in Brazil.

Where are Romi machines made?

Romi operates 13 factory units totaling more than 170,000 square metres, with 11 in Brazil and 2 in Germany. The Brazilian operations are centered on Santa Bárbara d'Oeste in São Paulo state and include five final assembly plants, two foundries, three machining facilities, two sheet metal operations and an electronic panel assembly plant. The German plants came with the 2012 acquisition of Burkhardt+Weber in Reutlingen.

Did Romi really build a car?

Yes. Romi announced the project in 1955 and launched the Romi-Isetta in 1956, built under license from Iso of Italy. It was the first automobile manufactured in Brazil and stayed in production until 1961. Romi had already built the Toro in 1948, the first tractor manufactured in Brazil.

What is a manual and CNC hybrid lathe?

It is a lathe that can be run conventionally by hand using handwheels and an apron, and also run under CNC control for programmed work. The point is versatility rather than cycle time. It suits maintenance departments, repair shops, prototype rooms and training programs, where one-off parts and short programmed batches both come through the same machine. Most builders stopped making the format because production shops do not need it, which is why the ones still built are worth knowing about.

Does Romi have service and parts in the United States?

Yes. Romi Machine Tools Ltd runs the North American business from Erlanger, Kentucky, providing presales and aftersales engineering, technical assistance and spare parts, and Romi has been exporting since 1944 with subsidiaries in seven countries. The support network is real but smaller than the largest Japanese builders operating in North America, so parts and service should be confirmed for the specific model rather than assumed.

Is a used Romi lathe worth buying?

For the right job, yes. Flat bed lathes hold their usefulness because the accuracy lives in heavy castings that do not wear out, and Romi pours its own iron. Wear items are ways, screws, bearings and electrics, all serviceable. Check bed wear at the headstock end, spindle condition, tailstock alignment and threading function, and on CNC or hybrid machines confirm the control generation is still supported. The manual and hybrid formats in particular are scarce on the used market, which supports values.