A BURY engineering company has certainly emerged as a fine specimen when it comes to aiding preservation of body parts.

Elantic Engineering has won two contracts worth a total of £42,000 for the manufacture of plastination chambers.

The equipment, harnessed primarily by teaching hospitals and university medical departments, is an important element in preservation of biological specimens, especially for anatomists.

For the uninitiated, plastination is a unique technique of tissue preservation developed by Dr. Gunther von Hagens in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1978.

The techniques consists of four main steps which are fixation, dehydration, forced impregnation and hardening or curing.

Plastination is carried out in many institutions worldwide and has obtained great acceptance, particularly because of the durability.

The chambers prevent decay which, although is a vital process of nature, is an impediment to morphological studies, teaching and research.

Mr Steven Haworth, managing director of Webb Street-based Elantic, said: "What we manufacture are stainless steel plastination chambers as well as cooling coils and vacuum pumps for the equipment."

The company's latest manufacturing contract for the chambers were fulfilled for Glasgow University and Oxford University.

But such products are not Elantic's core business. "We only manufacture about four of these a year and they are usually for teaching hospitals or universities," added Mr Haworth.

"This is a product we've been involved in for years. But this time around we've sold a few."

The Bury company's main business is in the design and manufacture and paper machinery process systems.