While “re-shoring” has become a hot topic, few manufacturers have done as much to make it a reality as David Nieper, a mid-sized clothing manufacturer based in the Midlands. The number of garment manufacturing jobs in the UK has fallen by 90 percent since 1980, pushing the country far down the world league table of textiles producers. [This article initially appeared in 2020.]

Undeterred, David Nieper is investing in local manufacturing, backed up by initiatives in technology, training, design and environmentally sustainable production. A new £4.5m fabric printing unit at the company’s HQ gives it a “massive opportunity to be more flexible and less wasteful” says Christopher Nieper, managing director.

Committed to encouraging more young people to consider careers in textiles, Nieper’s business has built links with local primary schools. It welcomes children to its main factory in Alfreton, Derbyshire,  where they can learn about the rudiments of the industry (see the photo above).

The company has set up its own training centre and has taken over the running of a local secondary school, while it has also become a standard bearer for “green” manufacturing through new processes and more sustainable energy sources.

According to a report by ecological experts at Nottingham University, which the family-owned David Nieper commissioned, emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the company’s domestic production processes are 40-60 percent lower than if the same clothes had been made in countries such as China, Bangladesh or Turkey.

“Consumers are much more aware today of the environmental cost of fashion, and with Brexit too, now is the time to re-shore production,” says Christopher Nieper, pictured below. He adds that David Nieper has become “more agile and more profitable by staying and investing in the UK”.

David Nieper is among a handful of companies that have chosen to buck the trend that says the best way to sell clothing in developed markets is to import from plants in cheaper regions such as Asia.

Others include Burberry, the fashion brand with its main UK plant in Yorkshire; Derbyshire-based John Smedley; Johnstons of Elgin, which runs two factories in Scotland; and Fashion-Enter which is in London.

In the past decade David Nieper has spent about £8m on new production units at its Alfreton HQ where the company was founded in 1961 by Christopher Nieper’s father, David. Its annual sales are running at about £18m and it employs just over 300 people. Other photos here were shot in its main plant.

The newest investment is a £4.5m fabric printing unit, opened in autumn 2019. This gives the business increased flexibility to introduce new designs in its market – premium women’s clothing – and respond faster to changes in demand.

As part of a commitment to education and skills David Nieper has over five years trained in its apprentice centre 85 mainly young people – most of them have stayed with the company.

The company has admirers both locally and further afield. Councillor Steve Marshall-Clarke, a member of Derbyshire county council and who lives in Alfreton, credits it with “bucking the trend in UK manufacturing”. He says it “adds up to a significant local force in jobs and training”.

Lise Edwards-Warrener, head of UK manufacturing at Burberry, says David Nieper has done a “superb job”. Kate Hills, founder of the textiles trade group Make it British says: “David Nieper is a fantastic example of how garment making in the UK is viable and sustainable and Christopher is a visionary of the industry.”

As well as its original sewing factory, David Nieper has units for knitting, document printing (creating 10m catalogues a year) and fabric cutting. Its new unit creates printed fabrics for garments such as dresses and swimwear.

Christopher Nieper says: “Sadly, most of the textile ecosystem in Britain has disappeared, so we’ve brought much of our supply chain in-house. There is so much waste and inefficiency in supply chains. [In contrast] when it’s all under one roof we make the right quantity of the right components at the right time.”

The fabric printing unit illustrates this. “In the past if we wanted to create a new fabric print for a dress, we might have to order our supplier’s minimum run of, say 500 metres and then wait several weeks for the order to arrive,” Nieper says.

“With the in-house plant we can print the exact quantity we need and without waiting. The new factory gives us a massive opportunity to make ourselves more flexible and less wasteful. We can increase the number of prints we offer, without the risk of left-over stock.”

Throughout the business the emphasis is on keeping lead times as short as possible to enable the company to react quickly to changes in the market. As part of this process, David Nieper stopped selling via retailers several years ago, instead selling direct to consumers online or via catalogues. “Being closer to the end customer brings multiple benefits, [including] better informed designs, greater customer loyalty and higher margins,” Nieper says.

The company runs its own apprentice centre, training mainly young people in sewing – a traditional UK strength where skills are now in short supply. Of the 85 who have been through the centre since it opened five years ago, nearly all are still with the company.

Faced with a severely diminished textiles supply chain in the UK, the company has sought to replace it with in-house production.

“The average age of our staff is over 50 and [many] will retire soon,” says Nieper. “As the [clothing] sector has largely disappeared from Britain’s shores, so have the skills. So, we either have to go offshore ourselves, or start all over again with young people. If we want to ensure there is a future for British textile production, we need to recruit and train and step up efforts to enthuse young people.”

The initiative over the local school – now named the David Nieper Academy – is not directly related to textiles but based on giving children “a rounded education in all subjects so they are equipped for any career route of their choice”, Nieper says. The school is run by an educational trust.

Nieper hopes that at least some of those leaving the school will end up working at his company – or in other local manufacturing businesses. “There is a view that young people don’t aspire to work in manufacturing, [but] this isn’t strictly true. It’s all about people and knowledge of careers. We offer young people [from schools in the region] the opportunity to visit our operations and we hope that at least some will think we could be a good place to work.”

Cutting a dash – the Midlands clothes maker aims its garments at an upmarket niche in women’s fashion.

In other education activity, David Nieper organises events at nearby primary schools, aimed at introducing young children to concepts of design and production. For instance, the company runs an annual “fashion for free” competition in which children create clothes using recycled materials they find around their home or school.

The company also works with the University of Derby and Chesterfield College, nearby educational establishments, to support fashion and textiles students.

On the issue of sustainability, while the Nottingham report scores David Nieper’s processes highly in terms of energy use, it also points out that garment production accounts for only a small proportion of the overall “carbon footprint” of most items of clothing. Much bigger percentages come from the manufacture of the materials used in the garments, including yarn and fabric, with these operations mainly happening far from the UK, in places over which David Nieper and other materials purchasers have little control.

Nieper says the study’s findings are a reminder of how far the company still has to go with its sustainability efforts. This has spurred it to organise new projects including increasing its use of solar energy and heat recovery units and moving to more energy-efficient production processes. The company’s ambition in the next few years, says Christopher Nieper, is to become a prime “exemplar of eco-friendly production”.

 The article was published in Made Here Now on February 10 2020.

The technology behind the most potent weapon systems ever devised could help the world move to low-carbon energy production, say the scientists and engineers behind one of the UK’s most innovative businesses.

Tokamak Energy is developing small fusion reactors for producing energy, crucially without the use of fossil fuels implicated in climate change. The science and technology challenges are among the most difficult faced by product developers in any industry.

Meanwhile the UK government has delivered a boost to fusion developments by announcing two big projects, including committing £220m to the design of a fusion power station – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production– that could be ready by around 2040. [This article initially appeared in 2019.]

Indicating confidence that the momentum behind fusion power is accelerating, Tokamak Energy has set out plans to triple employment to 200 by 2022. “We will need more experienced engineers and scientists,” says David Kingham, Tokamak Energy’s executive vice-chairman. “But we will also be offering opportunities to younger technically qualified people who want to get involved in a new industry working at the frontier of new engineering applications.” Kingham is in the picture above, with students the plant on work placements.

Tokamak Energy also illustrates ways in which manufacturers and technology developers can contribute to reducing carbon emissions. The manufacturing dimension to combating climate change – by finding alternative ways to make products or generate and transfer energy – will feature in stories in Made Here Now in coming months.

The technology being developed in all fusion programmes is based on the ideas behind hydrogen bombs. Detonated in tests but never used in warfare, these weapons are reckoned to be at least 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that devastated two Japanese cities at the end of the second world war

Tokamak Energy’s Melanie Windridge inspects a prototype of the company’s fusion reactors

Fusion is also the process that powers the Sun and other faraway stars. Ultimately it is responsible for human evolution and for all the energy consumed on Earth.

Tokamak Energy thinks its “compact spherical tokamaks” – each the size of a large room – will be ready for full operation by the 2030s. They would be probably be manufactured in several locations spread globally and sell for close to £1bn.

Mark White of UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, a venture capital company that has invested in Tokamak Energy, says: “I know there will be setbacks but I genuinely think that if anyone can do it [produce working fusion rectors by the 2030s] then they can.”

Based near Oxford, Tokamak Energy employs 65 people and is backed by £50m in investments. It aims to build on knowledge created from some of the world’s big publicly funded programmes in fusion power – such as the Joint European Tokamak in the UK, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) in France and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in the US.

Tokamak Energy and its commercial rivals in other countries believe that their approach – based on much smaller reactors than most of those under development in the state sector and using key technical advances especially in magnet technology – could be the way to deliver fusion power relatively soon.

Other companies developing compact tokamaks include Commonwealth Fusion Systems and TAE Technologies in the US and General Fusion in Canada. Two small UK start-ups are Pulsar Fusion and First Light Fusion.

 

Above: A close-up of part of the complex structure needed to hold in place plasma at a temperature of 150m deg C.

Kingham says: “While the publicly funded research programmes are important in creating much of the scientific basis for what we do, private initiatives are needed to ensure that we move ahead [in fusion] quickly. The extent of climate change means we don’t have the luxury to wait [for fusion power] – we will need it a lot sooner.”

Fusion power is based on forcing atoms such as hydrogen, held as a hot plasma, to combine, which releases large amounts of energy. The technologies Tokamak Energy is tackling include building the powerful superconducting magnets used to contain the plasma.

The plasma will be held at 150m deg C, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun, and will consist of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. While deuterium is easy to isolate from seawater, making large quantities of tritium is trickier.

It is done by bombarding lithium metal with neutrons using devices called “lithium blankets”, which would be embedded on the walls of working reactors. The process is “possible but difficult”, Kingham says.

An operating tokamak will require 20m amps – an amount of current some 100,000 times higher than that drawn by a typical UK household – operating continuously at a very low voltage. Attaining these high currents requires complex electrical engineering.

“We have a room full of 30 racks of high-tech supercapacitors required to discharge such large amounts of electricity in a short spurt,” Kingham says. So far, the company has cranked up its equipment to deliver 3m amps in short spurts.

The work required is expensive. Tokamak Energy’s research and development spending was £9m in 2017. It rose to £15m the year after and in 2019 it is likely to be almost £20m.

Over the next few years Tokamak Energy will need additional investment of “several hundred millions”, says Kingham. “We don’t anticipate too many problems in raising the necessary money. We have been making good progress and we have had a lot of interest.”

The current prototype system at Tokamak Energy is the ST40, a four-metre-tall steel vessel filled with a hot plasma of hydrogen contained in a powerful magnetic field. The plasma temperature reached 15m deg C in 2018. The company plans to attain 100m deg in 2020.

The next engineering model will be the ST-F1, which Tokamak Energy hopes to build in 2025. At about 10m tall and 10m in diameter, ST-F1 will be considerably bigger than the current machine – and only slightly smaller than what the company hopes will be the working machines.

Assuming the plans work out the final versions of the reactors that Tokamak Energy will build will produce roughly 150MW of electricity, about the tenth of the output of a conventional large gas-fired power station.

Exacting technologies hold the key to making fusion power work

Every second deep inside the sun hundreds of millions of tonnes of hydrogen combine to make energy, some of which reaches Earth and sustain lives. It all sounds so simple – doing the same thing in machines made by humans is a lot harder.

If the ideas being worked on by Tokamak Energy can be made to work, then success in developing several key technologies will a key factor. Among the areas under development at the company are superconducting magnets, digital power control, computerised modelling and 3D printing – which will be used to make key components in working fusion systems in later stages of the company’s developments. A company prototype is pictured above.

John Bromley of Legal & General Capital, an investment arm of the big financial group and a Tokamak Energy investor, believes the company is ahead of others in the same field “in terms of its technological knowhow” and is also moving ahead in developing the supply chains that would be needed for manufacturing.

Prof David Ruzic, director of the Center for Plasma Material Interactions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has studied Tokamak Energy’s technology programmes and has a research contract with the company. He says that in combining several different technologies, Tokomak Energy has found the “best approach” to making fusion power work.

Fusion involves pushing together atoms that have an immense internal resistance to combining. As a result formidable amounts of energy are needed to start the procedure. It’s the opposite process to fission – the technology for splitting atoms that formed the basis for the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, causing more than 200,000 deaths.

The company’s technical staff liaise with counterparts working on other fusion reactors. Pictured here is part of the interior of the government-funded Joint European Torus fusion reactor, under development in Oxfordshire

Nuclear fission – still hard to make work but easier than fusion – is the technology used in conventional nuclear reactors to produce energy.

Probably the most important technology in Tokamak Energy’s fusion power development concerns superconducting magnets. Fusion reactors required incredibly hot plasma, which is extremely diffuse and fragile – a million times less dense than air.

To keep the plasma from being contaminated and cooled by contact with material surfaces, it must be confined in a powerful magnetic field.

Creating the strong magnetic fields that are required is no easy matter. The answer, according to Tokamak Energy – and some of its competitors – lies in “high-temperature” superconducting magnets. Such magnets can provide the high currents needed for ultra-strong magnetic fields and require less energy than more conventional “low-temperature” superconducting magnets.

The difference between high and low temperature – in this context – is critical. A superconductor is a material with zero electrical resistance when it is extremely cold, so it doesn’t heat up when current flows through.

Conventional superconductors are cooled by liquid helium to minus 269 deg C (4 deg K). These forms of superconductors are used in ordinary superconducting magnets – hence the term low-temperature magnets. High-temperature superconducting magnets are based on materials that become superconducting at around the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, minus 196 deg C (77 deg K). While still cold, this is appreciably warmer than for the magnets’ low-temperature counterparts.

High-temperature superconducting magnets can generate a magnetic field of up to 40 Tesla, 20 times stronger than the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) systems in hospital scanners.

For its reactors, Tokamak Energy is working on high-temperature superconducting magnets that will deliver 20-25 Tesla.

A key factor has been the availability of skills in the Abingdon/Oxford area around where Tokamak Energy is based. “The fact that this area is one of the world’s leading clusters for superconducting magnets has been hugely helpful,” says David Kingham, executive-vice chairman at the company.

Participants in the cluster include publicly funded research operations such as Oxford University Materials Department and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory as well as companies such as Oxford Instruments and Siemens Magnet Technology. The Joint European Torus international fusion project is also located close by.

Among the technical challenges are producing laser-based systems for monitoring the condition of the plasma inside fusion reactors. The photo shows a researcher working on a laser system for the Joint European Torus

The key material used in the superconducting magnets being developed at Tokamak Energy is rare-earth barium copper oxide, a family of chemicals with special properties. Superconductors based on these compounds can sustain stronger magnetic fields than those that use other superconductor materials. The materials are delivered to Tokamak Energy as thin tapes, each containing just one micrometre (billionth of a metre) of the high-temperature superconductor within the tape.

Kingham says: “We are using tape from four of the 10 manufacturers worldwide that can make it. The quality is already good enough for our purposes, but the manufacturing volumes need to increase, and the cost needs to come down.”

For the time being, Tokamak Energy is validating its engineering using copper magnets – but in later prototypes it will need to use high-temperature superconducting magnets capable of stronger fields. Kingham says the company’s work on superconducting magnets has gone “better than expected” and is two years ahead of schedule.

In other developments, to ensure the plasma inside Tokamak Energy’s machine is free from contaminants it must be held in a near perfect vacuum. In practice this works out at one hundred billionth of normal atmospheric pressure – the level of vacuum experienced deep in outer space.

The “superfuels” that will power a new generation of reactors

 

Handling tritium – an exotic gas that is highly difficult to make – is an essential part of creating energy from super-hot plasma. Pictured here is Eva Belonohy a plasma containment expert working on the international Joint European Torus.

For fusion reactors to work they will need a reliable supply of an exotic gas that is unusually hard to make and which is about 2,000 times more expensive than gold.

Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen that is very rare in nature. When it is combined with deuterium – another hydrogen isotope- massive amounts of energy can be generated, as in hydrogen bombs.

Under Tokamak Energy’s plans, the first supplies of deuterium and tritium will be introduced to the company’s prototype machines in a few years’ time. Up to then, the systems will be put through their paces without any of these gases in place.

Since the amount of energy locked inside hydrogen is 10m times greater than fossil fuels, the company believes that one of its fully developed 150MW machines will run with only small amounts of fuel – about 10kg of deuterium and 15 kg of tritium a year.

If all goes to plan, Tokamak Energy’s plasma vessels will eventually be filled with gases that at current market prices cost up to £100,000 a gram. To put this into perspective, a conventional power station fired by coal would require 250,000 to 400,000 tonnes of fuel to provide the equivalent amount of energy.

Deuterium is relatively abundant – about one in 6,000 of the hydrogen atoms in seawater is deuterium. Extracting it is relatively straightforward. The gas is used as an isotopic marker in research and in various processes in the chemicals sector.

Tritium on the other hand presents huge challenges. The total world inventory is thought to be no more than 40kg, much of this associated with secret military programmes.

So a fusion reactor will need to “breed” its own tritium fuel from lithium. The idea is that a neutron will hit a lithium nucleus in a “blanket” around the tokamak – and produce tritium in situ.

While deuterium is cheap, the “market price” of tritium costs is close to £100,000 a gram, making it one of the world’s most expensive materials. The price would probably fall considerably if scientists worked out how to make it in volume.

State funds provide a boost to fusion developments

The UK government has delivered a sizeable fillip to fusion power with the announcement of two new projects that will involve collaboration with scientists and engineers from academic research and industry.

The bigger of the projects involves a £220m design of a “commercially viable” fusion power station. The government is also setting up a £22m fusion energy research facility in Rotherham.

Both UK programmes will involve work by the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire together with partners such as the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult – which is a Made Here Now sponsor.

The power plant – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production – that could be ready by 2040 or soon afterwards.

According to the UKAEA, STEP offers “the realistic prospect of constructing a powerplant by 2040”. The design of the project should be finished by 2024.

Andrea Leadsom, UK business secretary, said the STEP programme was “a bold and ambitious investment in the energy technology of the future”. She said nuclear fusion has “the potential to be an unlimited clean, safe and carbon-free energy source” adding that she wanted the first “commercially viable [fusion] machine” to be in the UK.

Governments around the world have spent heavily on developing fusion technology since the 1960s. Total expenditure on the research is put at about £2bn a year. However many of the government programmes are considered stull to be far from delivering the prospect of operational power plants. Many observers believe that fusion power based on the government projects to date is unlikely to lead to commercial systems until around the end of the century.

The article appeared in Made Here Now on October 22 2019.

 

Britain’s biggest trade body for manufacturing is launching its first large-scale event aimed at 16- to 24-year-olds, underlining how efforts to attract more young joiners are increasingly viewed as vital to the sector’s long-term prospects.

The format for MakeUK’s event in Birmingham on October 12 2019 has been devised with the help of a 12-strong “culture council” of people in their late teens and early-20s, set up by MakeUK to ensure the agenda reflects this age group’s interests. (This article dates to September 2019.)  

“Our message is that manufacturing is highly relevant [as a career] to young people with technical interests. If they want to have a positive impact on the world then manufacturing in its various forms gives them a great opportunity to do this,” says Mark Bernard, head of strategy at MakeUK.

The organisation has 5,000 member companies, a well-established apprentice training programme and strong links with government. It wants its Makers Meet event – which it hopes will attract 1,000 people – to become an annual fixture.

The launch marks a significant boost to long-running attempts by manufacturing to enlarge the sector’s talent pool and combat widespread skills shortages by selling itself more effectively to young people.

The ideas behind Makers Meet fit in with the strategy of Made Here Now, set up to promote a more positive image of UK manufacturing and assist in recruitment. MakeUK is a long-term supporter of the project, having been a sponsor since Made Here Now launched in 2014.

Makers Meet will highlight the idea that manufacturing in its 21st century guise covers a broad range of activities, from making traditional products such as power generators and ships, to developing new digitally enhanced devices such as miniaturised communications equipment for satellites.

Analysing data from such devices for customers such as weather forecasters is becoming as important a source of revenue for some manufacturers as product sales. This illustrates how providing services is increasingly becoming an essential part of the way manufacturers operate.

Equally, careers in manufacturing can involve working for small start-up businesses as well as established companies employing thousands of people.

The range of activities touched on by manufacturing is much bigger than most people think, says Andrea Bull, head of next generation marketing at MakeUK.

Modern production can encompass new ideas in virtual reality, as illustrated by work at the High Value Manufacturing Catapult in designing components for nuclear power stations

“The fields where manufacturing is relevant extend to areas such as fashion and music. The job of our event will be to highlight the possibilities [in manufacturing] and broaden the horizons of the people who come to it.”

Makers Meet will feature presentations and “hands-on” workshops organised by small manufacturing businesses such as robot builder Hausbots – a company in Birmingham started by 21-year-olds Jack Cornes and Harry Smith. It will involve discussions by experts in social media and marketing and will look at how manufacturers can play a part in reducing use of material resources and energy while also creating wealth and employment.

Role models – the youthful engineering team at Birmingham robot builder Hausbots. Left to right: Mike Skitsas, Jack Cornes, Harry Smith and Jenna Luchak

“Our research has found that a lot of younger people are saying they are drawn to career possibilities in businesses with an interest in social responsibility and sustainability,” Bull says.

Other groups that will discuss what they are doing at Makers Meet include XBlades Racing, an organisation promoting the development of new drones and that also organises drone races, and Snapmaker, which produces 3D printing machines. Big companies that will play a part include the UK operations of Siemens and Schneider, two large international businesses with a strong British presence.

In the past, most big events in the UK aimed at generating interest in technical subjects among young people have focused on engineering in all its forms, rather than on manufacturing specifically – MakeUK’s chosen field.

The trade body has enlisted the help of other organisations – most of which have a broad engineering-based agenda – to help promote Makers Meet. These include the engineering charity Smallpeice Trust; EngineeringUK, a promotional body for the whole of engineering; the Semta engineering skills organisation; the Stemnet network for science and technology “ambassadors”; and Birmingham Tech Week, a series of events in the Midlands based around engineering and backed by groups including Barclays and NatWest banks.

The 1,000 people that organisers hope will come to Makers Meet are likely to be a mix of school and higher education students plus young people already in work, including some of the apprentices taking courses at MakeUK’s training centre in Birmingham.

The article appeared in Made Here Now in 2019

 

 

Brompton Bicycle is “effecting cultural change” through its role in encouraging cycling in cities and improving people’s lives, according to its chief executive.

Will Butler-Adams says the company’s folding bikes – which can be packed into a small space and carried on public transport – have helped in “making cycling more attractive and comfortable” in cities.

“Travelling by bike is positive for many reasons – it improves people’s mental and physical health and encourages people to move away from using cars and causing pollution. We are helping to bring about a cultural change.”

The company – with sales of about £43m in the year to March 2019, roughly three-quarters of where are exported – has become one of the few UK manufacturers to have established a global reputation in a major consumer industry.

While Brompton is far from being the only folding bike manufacturer, the company is regarded as one of the market leaders. Others with a strong presence include Dahon and Pacific Cycle (which produces the Schwinn brand) in the US and Hummingbird, another UK business.

With 350 employees mainly in a factory in west London, Brompton is one of the best examples of a manufacturing business offering attractive job opportunities for young people, an area of focus for Made Here Now.

Ricky Do of BikeFolded, a US-based website, says of Brompton: ” I haven’t found another manufacturer so passionate about making a flexible transport solution for city dwellers and travellers. While other manufacturers are struggling to survive and many stopped making folding bikes, I strongly believe Brompton will stay in the business for a long time, simply because they put their heart into their products.”

The bike maker’s London plant can make 100,000 bikes a year – but could run out of space in the 2020s.

Butler-Adams says the company’s impact has been most marked in London – where Brompton has sold 130,000 bikes since its inception – and has been noticeable also in Brussels and Barcelona.

“But we still have a long way to go. While we have a significant presence in about 45 cities around the world, we sell only about 50,000 bikes a year – which is pathetic given the potential for this mode of transport.”

The company bases its bikes on designs devised over the past 30 years for joining about 1,200 metal and plastic parts, most of which are unique to the Brompton bike.

Butler-Adams says the company has made a “solid start” in developing a new series of foldable electric bikes, in a development with the Formula One racing team Williams. About 10 per cent of the company’s planned bike output of bikes in 2019 will be electric models.

Brompton’s factory has the capacity to make 100,000 bikes a year. Assuming it can continue its increase output at 15 per cent a year, the company will run out of space within the next decade, which explains why Butler-Adams has started to look at options for a second plant.

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In a cavernous plant on the outskirts of Coventry, a massive bet is being placed about the sort of vehicles that will be trundling around cities and along motorways over the next 30 years. The factory is the result of a £325m investment by a big Chinese automotive group and adds up to one of the boldest efforts in the UK to create a new generation of electric cars.

The site is run by London Electric Vehicle Company, a UK-based company owned by Geely, a fast expanding group controlled by the leading Chinese entrepreneur Li Shufu – who is known for his spare-time hobby writing poetry, as well as for a relentlessly global approach.

A key part of Li’s plans for LEVC is to make the Coventry plant a centre for development of new types of electric car, aided by recruitment of technical specialists, many of whom are likely to start at LEVC either as apprentices or engineering graduates.

The  investment stands out against the decision by Sir James Dyson, one of Britain’s best known entrepreneurs ,to spurn the idea of starting an electric car plant in the UK, choosing Singapore.

Among the 750 employees at the site – which opened in 2017 – is Pauline Dumont, one of the factory’s 200 development engineers. The 26-year-old Belgian, pictured at the start of this story,  joined LEVC in 2015 after finishing a postgraduate degree in automotive engineering at Cranfield University.

“I was excited at coming to work here – the job gives me the chance to help create a completely new product starting from zero,” says Dumont. “It’s been great being part of a team doing something special. I feel I have learned a massive amount in a short time.”

Electric cars could change the shape of  21st century motoring 

The first products from the factory are a new series of electric black cabs for London, which in time will replace the diesel-powered taxis that form a big part of the London street scene, but which will be gradually replaced by less environmentally intrusive new models. The LEVC-produced vehicle has been expressly designed to fit in with the capital’s increasingly onerous clean-air regulations.

Diesel vehicles are regarded particularly negatively because of their strong association with pollution and widespread health problems. Over the next decade, it appears that, worldwide, increasing numbers of vehicles will be based around electric propulsion instead of petrol and diesel engines — Britain and France have already said that new cars sold in their countries must be fully electric by 2040.

Volvo, the Swedish company that Geely bought in 2010 as part of a big international push, says that from 2019, it will no longer launch models powered only by internal combustion engines and all its vehicles will be hybrid or electric.

As for Geely’s efforts in the UK, it formed a joint venture with Manganese Bronze in 2007, and took a 20 per cent stake in the business. After the full acquisition and the development of its electric propulsion plans, Geely renamed the business LEVC.

Pointedly it dropped any references to taxis in the title, signalling its ambitions. Geely plans to ramp up production from Coventry to 20,000 vehicles a year by 2020. The output will comprise not just taxis but other sorts of electric cars aimed at markets outside Britain.

Steve Fitter, pictured below, assembly manager at the Coventry factory, who started at Manganese Bronze in 2000, says the Chinese investment has been “hugely welcome”. The Chinese owners have, he says, “a broader view of the world” than the previous top management at Manganese Bronze.

Alluding to the graduate engineers and apprentices at the factory, Fitter says: “We want to embed them into the company’s development programme. We want to grow a new workforce that will create a product cycle of new vehicles.”

The initial product from the factory – the London taxi – is strictly speaking a hybrid as it combines a lithium-ion battery with a petrol engine. That gives the vehicle the ability to travel for about 70 miles purely under electric power, or a total of about 370 miles when in hybrid mode and fuelled also by petrol.

Among the novel techniques being pioneered at the plant is extensive use of plastic- based composite panels that feature in much of the vehicle’s body, in place of the more orthodox steel. The panels are fixed to the car’s frame – made from aluminium, again rather than steel – through glueing rather than the normal welding process. Basing the structure of the car on plastics and aluminium leads to a less weighty body, offsetting the effect of the heavy battery, helping to reduce energy use when on the road.

A key partner in this part of the development is Novelis, the US-based aluminium producer owned by the Indian industrial group Hindalco. Novelis has a partnership with LEVC under which it supplies the aluminium in the body from a plant in Germany. Steve Fisher, chief executive of Novelis, told Made Here Now the relationship had led to some “unique insights” for both companies that could help with the development of more vehicle models in the future with similar characteristics.

Watching from the sidelines as the Geely plans for Coventry have taken shape is Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, doyen of the UK manufacturing scene who is the chairman and founder of Warwick Manufacturing Group, a high-profile part of the University of Warwick that is based in Coventry. It was Bhattacharyya who invited the Geely chairman Li to the city in the mid- to late-2000s, after previously meeting him in Beijing.

Lord Bhattacharyya – chairman of Warwick Manufacturing Group – introduced Geely’s chairman Li Shufu to Coventry and paved the way for the new investment. The two men are shown below.

Bhattacharyya says: “I’m interested in cars and so is Li Shufu – so it seemed natural he’d like to visit Coventry [a historic centre for UK vehicle production]. He wasn’t all that interested in taxis – taxis were taxis, and no one bothered with them – but then Manganese Bronze came to his attention and he got involved with the company.”

Bhattacharyya says Geely’s plans for Coventry are “very encouraging”. He describes Li – who has humble roots and started out in business by buying an old camera to photograph tourists at beauty spots – as a “man with ideas and a vision of the future”.

“I’ve always said that the UK car industry can do well under the right sort of leadership and what Geely is doing in Coventry bears this out,” Bhattacharyya adds.

by Peter Marsh

A version of this article appears in MadeHereNow.com. Note: Lord Bhattacharyya has died since the article was published. 

 

An innovative UK company is rethinking the production of one of the world’s most common industrial products, with its formation aided by an unusual business network focused on technology and manufacturing.

The Bessemer Society brings together “fantastic people who have fantastic opportunities and are facing similar challenges” according to Ian Balchin, a business veteran who is among its members.

The group assists the growth of companies in “hardtech” areas ranging from medical equipment to green energy. These are fields in which Britain generally has good skills and knowhow but where companies have often struggled to become established globally, due to lack of finance or high-calibre management.

Assuming the growth problems can be overcome, businesses in novel areas of manufacturing appear to offer young people attractive employment possibilities. [Note this article originally appeared in 2019.}

The new UK company that Bessemer helped spawn is Q5D Technology. The Bristol-based enterprise is attempting to disrupt the business of making wiring harnesses – dense collections of cables made every year in their tens of millions to join up components in electrical machines from cars to computers. Part of an early version of a Q5D machine is pictured at the start of this article and below.

 

Rather than use human labour plus limited amounts of automation to thread cables into the required patterns, the wiring would be imprinted directly into the plastic or metal of the machines. This would make possible more varied and complex harness designs, increase production speed and cut costs.

Q5D was started after a conversation at a Bessemer meeting by executives from two existing companies. “[We] identified that if we combined some of our respective knowledge and intellectual property, we could come up with something pretty unique,” says Janet Donovan, chief financial officer at M-Solv, an electronics processing business. In the photograph below, an operator at M-Solv checks on components used inside the company’s machines.

The other partner is CEL UK which makes automation equipment. The new ideas at the heart of Q5D’s technologies are in fields including 3D printing, robotics, new materials and control software.

A central theme to Bessemer is that by discussing common issues, individuals can learn from each other and that this should improve their chances of business success. “I’ve made [through Bessemer meetings] a lot of contacts which have led to business relationships. It is a very effective networking forum for people of a common persuasion,” says Nigel Salter of Badger Projects, an innovation management company.

Others among the society’s 100-strong membership say they gain from sounding out new ideas or capturing insights from others. “It’s good to have other like-minded people that you can discuss things with,” says Jill Shaw, chief executive of Kubos Semiconductor.

Alex Stewart, an unassuming Cambridge-based writer and analyst who started the society and is its “convenor”, says he feels it is important to make meetings as informal as possible to encourage discussion. The group he says unites people from different industries but who show similar qualities of “determination, perseverance and entrepreneurship”.

Among the members is 28-year-old Henrik Hagemann, co-founder of Customem, a start-up developing biological granulates to absorb hazardous material and used in pollution control. Alex Schey, 31, runs Vantage Power, a fledging business developing electrical power transmissions for cars.

A much bigger company also represented in the membership is Hexadex, which makes equipment for cleaning up vehicle exhausts and has annual sales of around £100m.

Meetings usually take place over dinner in towns around Britain and include speakers from outside the group. These have come from some of the well-known businesses with which Bessemer has links, among them Rolls-Royce, Tata Steel and Renishaw. The society is named after Sir Henry Bessemer, the Victorian inventor and industrialist who paved the way to mass production of steel and whose image is at the end of this story.

Jonathan Watkins, a seasoned entrepreneur who is chief executive of Coventry-based Impression Technologies, which makes lightweight automotive parts, says he has through the group picked up new ideas on topics such as “[dealing with] China, business models, scale up issues, talent [retention and recruitment] and funding ”. The picture below shows part of Impression Technologies’ factory making components for the Aston Martin carmaker.

According to Stewart, the strength of the companies making up the society’s membership is “almost always the unique feature of their technology”. A weakness is that sometimes “the technology can [in the mind of the entrepreneur] take centre stage ahead of what the customer is looking for.

“A problem for an engineer is to get into the head of a customer, especially a commercial customer. The operational knowledge and experience in the Bessemer Society of members who have learnt this lesson the hard way can therefore be a benefit for others.”

 

Bessemer skills range from clever chemistry to farm robotics

The Bessemer society’s biggest success story to date has been that of Harry Destecroix, a 32-year-old biotechnologist and co-founder of Ziylo, a company paving the way to make new forms of insulin for diabetics.

In 2018 Ziylo was bought by Novo Nordisk, a big Danish pharmaceutical company, in a deal worth potentially more than £600m, with the pay-out linked to scientific and commercial milestones.

Ziylo is a spinout from the University of Bristol which designed synthetic molecules that bind the glucose in blood. Novo Nordisk thinks Ziylo’s technology could help it to create new types of “glucose responsive insulins” that could prevent hypoglycaemia.

The condition is caused by a dangerous fall in blood glucose levels. It can be triggered by incorrectly managed insulin therapy.

Destecroix told a Bessemer meeting that behind Ziylo’s success was a determination to focus on disciplines in which it had proven competence, rather than risk being side-tracked. “We concentrated on understanding glucose chemistry – we didn’t want to move off into other areas such as [drug delivery] devices.”

Mike Karim, chief executive of Oxford Endovascular, is also in a medical field – making tiny metallic tubes for inserting into the blood vessels of people who have had brain aneurysms. Nova Extraction – also represented in the society – is building machines to extract nutrients from plants where the technology could be useful to the fragrance and flavourings industry.

In a different field of materials, Cambridge-based Paragraf says it has discovered an economical way to make “wonder material” graphene – carbon made in layers just one atom thick that could have uses in many industries including energy, industrial processing and electronics.

Homing in on a topical field, Recycling Technologies has engineered a machine to convert hard-to-recycle plastic waste such as shopping bags and crisp packets into fuel oil. It has started trials with supermarket chain Tesco to test out the ideas.

Other Bessemer members come from Libertine, a company based in Sheffield producing components for high-efficiency electrical machines; Ibex Automation, a maker of agricultural robots; Polysolar, which makes solar glass for building exteriors to create energy from the sun; and Innova Designs, a pioneer in body tracking monitors for checking on people doing dangerous jobs such as soldiers and firefighters.

This article appeared in Made Here Now on May 30 2019

 

The death of Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya – founder and chairman of Warwick Manufacturing Group – has robbed the UK of a charismatic leader who has played a key role in the reawakening of British manufacturing in recent years.

Lord Bhattacharyya built up Warwick Manufacturing Group into one of the world’s most influential applied research centres. He is pictured above with Ratan Tata, former chairman of the Indian industry group Tata, and among the many global business leaders who he counted as collaborators and friends.

Combining the wiles of a politician with the panache of a showman, the India-born peer conveyed globally through his teaching organisation powerful new ideas on how to succeed in 21st century industry. [Note this article dates to 2019 – when Bhattacharyya died.]

Asked almost 20 years ago about the strategies manufacturers should adopt to win out Bhattacharyya answered: “They should develop their skills, learn to transfer technology, and formulate an international strategy. Then they have a chance.”

Other principles that Bhattacharyya set out stress the importance of collaboration. “Just as a brain surgeon could never perform in isolation, a top manufacturing engineer needs a team of people,” was one Bhattacharyya aside.

Aided by guidelines established by Bhattacharyya, successive UK governments have done more to recognise the role of manufacturing as an economic lever, a view enshrined in the UK’s industrial strategy, unveiled in 2017. Bhattacharyya spent several years advising Nelson Mandela on an industrial policy for South Africa after apartheid.

Bhattacharyya’s biggest legacy is WMG, which he set up in 1980 as part of the University of Warwick. WMG is one of the world’s foremost manufacturing research and teaching groups with 600 staff and an annual turnover of £200m.

Development work at Warwick Manufacturing spreads across topics from electronics to composites materials, usually organised with an industrial partner

Sir Vince Cable, industry secretary during the 2010-15 Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, said Bhattacharyya was “a giant of British manufacturing…He believed passionately in the value of manufacturing and practised what he preached.”

Sir Richard Lambert, a former director general of the Confederation of British Industry and former chancellor of Warwick University, said:” I first met Lord Bhattacharyya in London back in the 1980s. He was dropping lots of names, and talking very big, and I couldn’t quite believe he was for real. So I went up to see him at WMG – and was completely blown away by what I found.

“The bosses of half the country’s biggest engineering companies were sitting around his department in their cardigans, drinking coffee and being absolutely inspired by what he was saying. Namely, that they could dramatically up their game if they combined intellectual rigour with commercial acumen. He spoke a language that I hadn’t heard in the UK before, and I thought he was inspirational.”

The Warwick guru, said Lambert, showed through his achievements that “excellence was both possible and necessary”.

Lord Bhattacharyya had a formidable list of contacts: here he shows Theresa May and  Philip Hammond (in the days when they were UK prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer) around Warwick Manufacturing Group’s HQ.

On the international front, Bhattacharyya was particularly effective in encouraging the big Indian industrial group, Tata, to invest in the UK, notably through its 2007 move to buy Corus, the steel business that was formerly part of British Steel, and its acquisition a year later of the Jaguar Land Rover car company.

Prior to the JLR deal, Ratan Tata, then Tata’s chairman, was all set to invest in Germany as part of a global automotive industry expansion. That was until Bhattacharyya invited him to the UK to show what British vehicle engineering was capable of.

Tata said Lord Bhattacharyya played “a significant role in enhancing the visibility of high-technology manufacturing enterprises in the UK”. Ralf Speth, JLR’s chief executive, said Bhattacharyya had been “remarkable and inspirational”.

Apart from Tata, Bhattacharyya’s ideas had a big impact on other companies in India – where WMG has an impressive reputation.

Baba Kalyani, chairman of Bharat Forge, a big India-based maker of forgings with plants in the US, France and Germany, said Bhattacharyya “was always full of ideas and self-confidence…He was a guru to many Indian industrialists and business houses”.

While generally exhibiting charm and good humour, Bhattacharyya could in private be scathing about individuals in business or government who he reckoned weren’t up to the job.

He also directed scorn at those UK companies that in his opinion, failed to invest enough of their own cash in research and development, preferring to lobby for government handouts. In UK industry, he liked to say, there was no shortage of good engineers “but a lack of leadership”.

Bhattacharyya had a guileful side. This was shown when, ahead of Tata’s 2007 move to buy Corus, journalists picked up rumours that the two companies might be talking.

Anxious to head off stories that might jeopardise the deal, Bhattacharyya dismissed the conjecture as “bar talk”. For Bhattacharyya, such conversations were all part of an effort to direct the progress of UK manufacturing in in a positive direction.

Bhattacharyya – who continued as the chairman and driving force of WMG until his death – was part of a Bangalore family which had made its money in tea and steel. In his later life years he never appeared short of money and liked to be transported around in a vehicle from his fleet of UK-made Range Rovers.

Enthused by the career possibilities in production, the young Bhattacharyya arrived in Britain in 1960. Initially, he found most of the food so inedible that he lived for several days on Cadbury’s chocolate.

A year later he enrolled as an engineering apprentice at a London factory run by Lucas Industries, at that time a big maker of automotive components. (Later, Bhattacharyya bought a substantial house in Birmingham that had once been the home of Joseph Lucas, the company’s founder, and lived in it until he died

“I got into engineering because in those days this was considered sexy,” Bhattacharyya told me in 2000. “And British manufacturing was something that when I was young in India we all looked up to.”

But it did not take long for him to discover the sector’s shortcomings. “Although there were a few golden nuggets, British management (in the 1960s) lacked intellectual horsepower. The understanding of the global environment and world politics was pretty well zilch.”

Bhattacharyya’s desire to improve matters led to the creation of WMG – designed around the then unfamiliar concept in Britain of industry and academics working together. Today, WMG says it has “strong relationships” with 1,000 companies globally and has trained 35,000 students from 75 countries.

Bhattacharyya was a strong supporter of Made Here Now, set up to improve the image of manufacturing and encourage more people into it. He was a member of the project’s advisory board.

Another company that Bhattacharyya helped to bring to the UK was the big Chinese car maker Geely, owner of two large UK-based industrial businesses, the Lotus sports car company and LEVC, a pioneering producer of electric vehicles.

Carl-Peter Forster, LEVC chairman and a non-executive director at Geely, said Bhattacharyya will be remembered as “someone who made things happen”.

Lessons from a global guru

Lord Bhattacharyya has left behind numerous ideas and maxims that impart useful nuggets of insight into how modern manufacturing works.

“If you want to be a good manufacturer, you must recognise you can never be an expert in everything,” was a typical remark. “You are part of a broad manufacturing economy. You need to be part of a connected supply chain involving both manufacturing in its narrowest sense [involving physical production] and access to services and other things like software and new materials.”

Applying this dictum more specifically, Bhattacharyya said: “To make a success [for instance] of an electric car you will need a lot of technology that will almost certainly be supplied by someone else. You need connections and you need guidance.”

Venu Srinivasan is one noted industrialist who says he owes a lot to Bhattacharyya’s teaching and ideas.

In 1975 Srivinisan, chairman of TVS, a large Indian industrial group, spent a year as an apprentice in the UK at Lucas Industries, the British car parts maker where Bhattacharyya worked as a production engineer. The older man was assigned to Srinivasan as a mentor.

“Since the mid-1980s, when TVS was a regional moped company, [Kumar] has guided our vision and thinking to expand and grow into a company with a global scale and footprint,” Srivinasan says.

“Kumar guided our turnaround in the 1990s by implementing excellence in manufacturing and a lean supply chain. His vision inspired us to learn, grow and educate our people in cutting edge practices from around the world.”

On many topics, Bhattacharya had a strong opinion.

Definitions of industry: “Manufacturing is the production of goods, plus the creative services that go into them. In the past we [in Britain] have been to blame for defining manufacturing too narrowly.”

The UK without a strong manufacturing sector: “We would be heading for Doomsday. We are not gods; we cannot live on thin air, or just by using mobile phones.”

Manufactured products: “All successful products are global.”

Thoughts about Britain: “The UK is not a mass country. People have such individualistic attitudes. Getting people in Britain to work together is always fraught.”

Sir James Dyson [the technology entrepreneur]: “Dyson is good but there’s only one of him. We need more people like him.”

Brexit: “I’m worried but I think we will have a soft Brexit. Common sense will prevail.”

 

This article first appeared in Made Here Now on March 19 2019

The article examines five ways UK manufacturers are seeking to expand, despite the difficulties caused by the country’s European Union exit. The five strategies are: capitalising on UK engineering, reshoring, boosting trans-Atlantic trade, improving local supply chains and focusing on product strengths. A version of this article appeared in Made Here Now in 2019. It has not been updated.

Capitalising on UK engineering: Swedish car innovator homes in on Britain

An electric car start-up from Sweden has shrugged off worries about Brexit by choosing Britain for its main global factory, citing the country’s strengths in specialist engineering and availability of high-quality recruits. Some of the company’s UK staff are in the picture above.

Lewis Horne, the 34-year-old chief executive of Uniti, says he has been influenced by the UK’s leading position in the engineering needed for high-performance cars, especially lightweight materials. “The Brits invented production of composites [blends of materials useful in cutting vehicle weight],” says Horne, who started Uniti in 2016.

Nile Henry is enthusiastic about what the Create Education training group has done for his organisation. “It’s had a transformational impact,” says Henry, chief executive of the Blair Project, which aims to inspire the next generation of engineers through making and racing electric go-karts.

Henry is pictured (right) in the photo, next to the Blair project’s Marilyn Comrie. Also shown are royal visitor Prince Harry and  Paul Croft and Michelle Chatterley of the Create Education training agency.

Now, Create Education – based in Chorley near Manchester and which organises workshops for 3D printing throughout the UK – is planning a big extension in its activity. It intends to double in each of the next two years the number of courses it runs, to reach a total of up to 200 a year. Each course typically involves 15-20 people and lasts one to three days. (This article appeared in Made Here Now in 2019.)

The group is at the centre of a diverse network of people throughout the UK, united by an interest in 3D printing, but with a range of backgrounds and goals. As a result, Create Education has brought together in education ventures a mix of organisations – including businesses, schools and community groups –that might otherwise have remained apart.

Create Education works mainly with teachers and young people. It focuses on 3D printing or additive manufacturing, a fast-moving technology for creating items in short production runs and with potential applications in industries from toys to aerospace.

The central idea is helping young people learn about engineering and technology. That aligns with the goals of Made Here Now, established to highlight innovative manufacturing and encourage more young people to consider this as a career.

“Giving children the chance to try out new thinking with an emerging technology [3D printing] is very valuable in equipping them with the sorts of skills they may need in the future,” says Michelle Chatterley, head of education at Create Education. The group employs seven people including directors, Paul Croft and Alex Mayor.

The emphasis on 3D printing makes sense since the technology – which provides ways of building up complex objects layer by layer relatively quickly – has captured the imagination of many young people. “Many school children find 3D printing hugely inspiring,” says Chatterley.

Also, it can be learned about using cheap desktop machines suited for schools, rather than the expensive and bigger “professional” systems used in industry.

The Blair Project is among the groups with which Create Education has collaborated. With Create Education’s help, in 2016 the Blair Project started using 3D printing and computer-aided design to create its own karts, cutting their cost from £6,000 to £1,000.

Racing karts made from 3D-printed parts are at the centre of programmes organised by the Blair Project, supported by Create Education

The changes enabled the project, named after Henry’s brother, to add a production and design element to its activities in organising kart racing. “They [Create Education] turned us into makers and got us to where we are today,” says Henry. His project often works with children from poor or socially disadvantaged backgrounds who might lack the opportunities to learn about engineering and technology.

Prince Harry has been among those interested in what the Blair Project does. The 34-year-old royal dropped in to the Three Sisters Racing Circuit in Wigan, near Liverpool, in 2016 to talk to people associated with the project, meeting Chatterley and Croft at the same time. Chatterley says of the Blair Project: “We have helped and supported each other.”

Another group to have worked with Create Education is Renishaw, an innovative UK company which is a big maker of specialist measuring probes and related instruments, while also producing its own brand of 3D printing machines. With 3,000 employees in the UK, where it does nearly all its production, it runs an extensive schools programme designed to boost interest among young people in engineering.

Simon Biggs, a former teacher who is Renishaw’s education centre outreach officer, describes Create Education as “a very professional group of people who offer fantastic resources for the teaching community”. He adds: “There do not seem to be many comparable companies to Create, so they continue to be the ‘go to’ education provider for support and help [in 3D printing].”

As well as Renishaw, Create Education organises courses and events in conjunction with other businesses including Autodesk. The big US-based provider of design and manufacturing software was among the participants at a three-day training session for 300 young people organised by Create Education in September 2018. The event was organised with media group TCT at its big 3D printing exhibition in Birmingham, with another collaborator being Bloodhound, a project started by Richard Noble to build a supersonic-speed car.

Children learn about 3D printing at Renishaw’s education centre in Miskin, south Wales

According to Chatterley, interest sparked by such ventures is increasing demand for Create Education’s services. From the 50 or so courses and related events it operated in the year to September 2018, it hopes to push this to 100 in 2019, with the figure possibly doubling again the year afterwards.

Often, she says the most useful way in which Create Education can assist on schools’ projects is to focus on teachers: “However good and enthusiastic teachers are they can sometimes be a barrier to helping children learn – particularly about a new and evolving technology. That’s why it’s important to give teachers the skills they need to help children learn.”

A good example of how some of the projects supported by Create Education can involve a mix of entities is a school’s programme in Plymouth organised by Plymouth Manufacturing Group, a partnership of Plymouth-based business.

The PMG – among the UK’s most active regional industry associations – wanted to boost awareness among local children about career opportunities in engineering.

A good way to do this, it reckoned, was through focusing on 3D printing, in a scheme assisted by Create Education. Also involved were several Plymouth manufacturers and FabLab Plymouth, a digital fabrication facility at Plymouth College of Art. Gemma Selley, a PMG consultant, says Create Education provided “fantastic support”, ensuring that children participating in the scheme gained useful experience.

A key factor in Create Education’s progress is that it supports its education services through a separate venture, selling equipment and services from other companies. These include the Netherlands-based 3D printing machine producer Ultimaker; Printlab, which provides curriculum materials in digital manufacturing; and Filamentive and Innofil3D, two UK-based suppliers of the filament materials used in 3D printing.

Small desktop machines for schools give young people practical experience of modern design and manufacturing

The commercial operations provide income which enables Create Education to cut the cost of courses it runs. It provides some of them for free – an attraction for many schools hit by cuts in education budgets.

Outside the commercial sphere, Create Education has links on training projects with a range of other organisations with wider social aims. These include the Crafts Council, a leading charity for craft-based production; Barclays Eagle Labs, a network of workplaces for entrepreneurs financed by Barclays Bank; and ECraft2Learn, a European Union-wide group backing small ventures in digital fabrication and other novel areas of production.

Additive manufacturing may help tutor tomorrow’s engineers

Small community-based “maker workshops” with which it has worked include FabLab Sunderland, iForge in Sheffield and MakerNow in Penryn. It has also collaborated with MakerVersity, a London-based group that operates workplaces for manufacturing and tech-based entrepreneurs, and Tech Will Save Us, an unusual operation that makes toys and technology kits for children combining teaching and play.

(The article appeared in Made Here Now originally.)