A new company has emerged from the ashes of a collapsed manufacturer.

Richard Nutbean and Matthew Chart lost their jobs when Carringworth, based in Small Dole, near Henfield, was liquidated last year and have sunk thousands of pounds of their own money into founding JEHC Precision Engineers Ltd.

The risk already seems to be paying off however after they secured £500,000 worth of orders within a few weeks.

Mr Nutbean and Mr Chart, along with their four employees, had all been working for Carringworth for several years before it went bust in the recession.

The company, which was turning over £2 million a month at its peak, made components for the car industry but when the credit crunch hit, orders dropped by 90% almost overnight.

Hope It made several redundancies before Christmas 2008 but a few months later the bank pulled the plug and it went into administration.

Mr Nutbean was kept on by the administrators to oversee the auctioning off of its equipment.

There seemed to be some hope when a London entrepreneur approached him and Mr Chart about starting a new business.

They had a major customer lined up until their backer suddenly pulled out. But the men were given the confidence that they had a viable business plan.

Despite a combined 35 years at Carringworth, their redundancy packages were barely five figures so they needed a loan.

After putting their houses up as collateral they managed to convince Lloyds TSB to provide finance as well as securing investment through the Enterprise Finance Guarantee scheme.

Together this amounted to £200,000 but Mr Nutbean and Mr Chart had to scrape together another £80,000 through borrowing from family members and credit cards.

The companymoved into a 12,000sq ft production facility in Mackleys Industrial Estate, Small Dole, in March, and met its first order on April 8.

Since then it has secured £500,000 of work from multinational corporation Delphi Automotive and is in the process of trying to win new customers.

Mr Nutbean said: “We had the belief that we had the core engineering skills to do this but it has been a very stressful time.”

But Mr Nutbean said their hard work is paying off and hopes to take on three more engineers in the next few weeks.

He added: “We have already had a contact from a lot of ex-Carringworth people and hope to bring more in.”

sam.thomson@theargus.co.uk