S itting on the boundary of County

Durham and Northumberland,

Consett enjoyed the fruits of

being a steel town in the 18th and 19th

centuries, but then experienced

deprivation as that UK industry sector

later became dominated by Sheffield.

The Consett Iron Company was

established in 1864 as a successor to the

original Derwent Iron Company that started

up in 1840, when the first blast furnaces

were introduced. Over the next 100 years,

Consett developed into one of the world’s

most prominent steel-making towns, and

became synonymous with the industry

– making the steel for the Blackpool Tower

and early nuclear submarines.

Residents comment on the unearthly

glow that the works used to cast over the

town, which was renowned for the cooling

towers and other plant dominating the

skyline. At the height of the sector’s boom,

a pall of red dust hung over Consett –

composed of atmospheric iron oxide from

steelmaking.

In 1980, under a Thatcher-led

Conservative government, Consett’s

steelworks was closed for good, leading

to industrial unrest, the loss of 3,700 jobs,

and an unemployment rate of 36% the

following year – double the national

average. The decline was characterised by

local people as ‘the murder of a town’.

Since then, regeneration projects in the

1990s have aimed to improve its fortunes.

Tobias Heintz, managing director of

Pinnacle Re-Tec – an small manufacturer

that reverse-engineers pumps and pump

components for sectors including oil and

gas and power generation – based his

business on an industrial estate in Consett

when he set it up seven years ago, having

formerly worked for the Weir Group in

Glasgow. Heintz describes the region as

beautiful and unpretentious, with normal

people doing normal things. “The people

are dedicated and hardworking,” he says.

However, as elsewhere in the country,

skills are a problem. Half of Pinnacle’s

workforce of 34 is aged over 60, Heintz

says, and half are under 30, with very few

between either age group – a sign of the

decline of apprenticeships during the

industry’s lean years.

However, he is positive about the young

people the firm employs. “I don’t see any

of the traits that are mentioned negatively

about the younger generation,” he says. “I

don’t see any trace of them in the

candidates we’re hiring, or in the people

Engineering companies in the North East of England are diversifying in order to survive in the global marketplace, but a skills shortage remains a concern for some employers. Ben Hargreaves reports

Northern lights

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PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING OCTOBER 2014 29

Reverse-engineering is kept as

simple as possible, with the minimum

number of points taken from original

equipment, so laser scanning isn’t used,

because it generates high volumes of

data. “You can ascertain diameter with

three points, so all of our scanning is

done with mechanical probes,” says

Heintz. “We can manipulate them and

bend them the way we want to. We build

up a minimal model that’s less complex,

with smaller files, and it’s far easier to

WE BUILD A MODEL THAT’S LESS COMPLEX AND EASIER TO MANIPULATE. THE LESS DATA YOU HAVE, THE BETTER

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Bridge club: Companies in the North East are expanding their horizons to embrace new products

that are being sent to us. The college

sends great kids, and we take them

onboard.” The challenge will be finding

more as the business expands, he adds.

Pinnacle Re-Tec uses traditional

measurement technologies such as

Vernier calipers, micrometers and CMMs

to measure components from pumps or

complete pieces of kit that have been

damaged, create CAD models, and

produce new versions to order, through

casting and machining. The castings are

outsourced to local suppliers when

possible, although some larger items are

shipped in from Heintz’s native Germany.

The key is making sure that the pump

components are manufactured to the

original design without access to

engineering drawings – and more swiftly

and cheaply than the OEM can manage.

M A N U F A C T U R I N G

Compressed-air excellence: Dräger has invested in automation at its breathing apparatus plant in Blyth

North East

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WWW.MTS-CFD.COM

MTS offers consultancy services in flow simulation using Computational Fluid Dynamics.

030_PE1014.indd 1 24/09/2014 11:38

M A N U F A C T U R I N G

PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING OCTOBER 2014 31

manipulate. It’s all about simplicity – the

less data you have, the better.”

An impeller blade might be captured

once, for example, and then replicated over

and over again, with each blade being

placed equidistant in the computer model.

Reverse-engineering a design is the

quickest part of the process, sometimes

taking a matter of hours, but producing

large castings can take weeks or months.

“For medium-sized castings I go to

Germany, because they provide a better

service when it comes to delivery times,”

he says. The business makes its living by

producing parts on time – because delays

to oil or electricity production caused by

pump failure are so expensive – and

penalties are written into its contracts if

components are delayed.

Heintz admits the company’s services,

many of which are exported, aren’t cheap,

but knows he has a big selling point in

being able to outmanoeuvre OEM pump

manufacturers in responsiveness. “There

are companies that can make an impeller,

or shaft, or casing. It’s not so difficult to get

it right, but we have to get it right every

day, with every single part. We are very

accurate, and high-speed. And if the main

oil transfer pump at an installation goes

down, you will hear about it,” he says.

Germany is where Heintz trained – he

also has an MBA from graduate business

school Insead – and he holds the protected

title of the traditional engineer’s degree

Diplom-Ingenieur, which is equivalent to a

masters degree. Heintz acknowledges that

this gives engineers in Germany an

advantage over their peers in the UK.

Internationally, however, he believes

British engineering is regarded as among

the best in the world. “Most countries have

a good view of British engineering –

perhaps better than the Brits themselves.”

Heintz also believes that the UK

engineering environment has improved. “I

remember chatting with a guy from the

Treasury in 2004 and he was saying that

we didn’t need engineering any more. The

climate for small engineering businesses

has improved. The help we get for

exporting is miles better, through UKTI and

UK Export Finance – tools the like of which

German manufacturers have had for

decades.

“The government is now publicly

pushing engineering. There are a lot of

clever people in this country who might

have chosen a career in the City. Those

people may go into engineering.”

Another small company in the region

that’s doing well is Tharsus, a contract

manufacturing firm based in Blyth,

Northumberland, 20km north-east of

Newcastle on the coast.

As we went to press, the company was

waiting to find out whether it had won the

award for best SME at this year’s IMechE

Manufacturing Excellence Awards. Such an

achievement would represent a real

turnaround at Tharsus, which had to lay off

half its staff during the recession and has

reinvented itself as a state-of-the-art

design and manufacturing collaborator that

brings innovative ideas to fruition.

Tharsus’s roots are as a ‘metal-bashing’

shop with a 50-year heritage, founded in

1964 and now wholly owned by Brian

Palmer, a former automotive engineer who

began his career at Nissan in nearby

Sunderland. In Blyth, which like Consett is

deprived, the company is providing

employment for 140 people, with the

promise of more to jobs to come and land

next to its facility available for expansion.

Tharsus saw a 75% drop in orders at

the height of the financial crisis, says

Palmer. “Traditional sheet metal working

isn’t a scalable business model. There’s a

handful of firms with turnovers of more

than £20 million. This is now a knowledge-

based business.”

That business includes making 12

component washers a day for Safety Kleen

and a hush-hush project developing a

robotics system for a FTSE 250-listed firm,

as well as manufacturing products for

Rapiscan, which produces security

equipment for airports. Metal fabrication

remains part of the business, but a small

one. Tharsus’s growth is being generated

by further diversification into contract

manufacturing and innovation.

“For a traditional metal basher to

convert to the kind of business we are isn’t

an easy step. We spent a lot of money

getting to where we are. We want to prove

that we did the right thing,” says Palmer.

There has had to be a willingness to

embrace new markets and ideas, and to

take risks, he says. There has also been a

desire to embrace a flexible, lean and

scalable production environment, to share

some of the upfront risk involved in

developing new designs, but to also ensure

a sound commercial model is in place to

exploit manufacturing.

It has not always been easy to convince

others of the business case, admits

Palmer. “It probably took us two years to

understand it. There were a lot of channels

in the market that have turned into blind

alleys – but you need to go down them,

and engage with customers on the way.”

North East

A WILLINGNESS TO EMBRACE NEW MARKETS AND IDEAS WAS NEEDEDRescue remedy: Fire services globally use Dräger equipment

PE53.p28-32.Northeast_v2.indd 31 24/09/2014 15:15

But Tharsus has the engineers to

succeed, he says. “If all we did was quite

conservative projects, with surefire

commercial winners, this wouldn’t be an

exciting place to be an engineer. But it is.”

Former MX finalist Dräger – which

picked up the overall winner award at the

IMechE Manufacturing Excellence Awards

in 2012 – manufactures compressed-air

breathing apparatus just down the road

from Tharsus. Part of a German, family-

owned multinational manufacturing firm,

the company is the design authority for that

type of equipment in the group.

As well as manufacturing, Dräger

carries out research and development at

the Blyth facility. The company makes

high-specification, composite material-

based breathing cylinders with glass-fibre

protective layers, using a high degree of

automation on the factory floor to reduce

labour costs. The breathing-apparatus

business was originally established on the

site more than 50 years ago and has since

been acquired by the German firm, says

Michael Norris – an American and former

Cummins man who runs Dräger in the UK.

“Because there’s such expertise here,

there has never been the need to think

about going anywhere else for this work,”

he says. In fact, some work that was taking

place overseas is now coming back to the

UK plant, including electronics work that

was being carried out in Malaysia.

“The technical side is less a driver than

the economic side,” says Norris, citing the

inflation of overseas wages as a key factor,

as well as the rising cost of materials and

transport. “After a while, that disparity

between wages here and overseas

changed. If you put the systems, products

and processes in place, people are just as

capable of manufacturing overseas as they

are here. If you don’t provide good

leadership or infrastructure, most issues lie

in the systems that allow people to do their

jobs. If quality issues exist, it’s because you

didn’t put the processes in place.”

Automation should be used on the

shopfloor to take out variation in a process

and thereby improve it, he says. This

process would continue to enhance quality

and bring down cost at Dräger.

Norris, from Ohio, has worked in the

British engineering industry for 20 years.

“There’s some brilliantly talented

engineering creativity here, but getting

ideas to market is a struggle,” he says.

Successful companies can’t rest on

their laurels. Efficiency improvements have

to be made continuously, he says. “The

best way of ensuring you become obsolete

is to think you’re too bloody good.” Q

Seta helps employers in region to plug skills gap

Robin Lockwood is the chief executive of training organisation Seta, which for decades has been helping engineering companies in the North East make their workforces more skilled. Seta is a not-for-profit group training association and also a registered charity, set up to service the training needs of engineering businesses.

Seta is the largest engineering training centre in Tyne & Wear and has its own workshops, which include state-of-the-art CNC lathes and machining centres.

From its Washington base, it offers engineering apprenticeships, traineeships, and both standard and bespoke commercial training courses.

Lockwood says Seta is working with several new companies that wouldn’t previously have taken apprentices on. “That’s an indication that people see the need to do something about skills, and are in a position to make a long-term commitment to skills.” It doesn’t make sense to think of the engineering industry in the North East as a homogenous group, he adds, and some firms are faring better than others – those in automotive, for example – although the overall picture is much brighter than it was during the financial crisis.

Seta says many engineering and manufacturing companies in the UK are struggling to find workers with the technical skills they need. Other companies might have the right skills, but are concerned that they have an ageing workforce. “These two problems could seriously restrict a company’s ability to step up production as the economic recovery gathers pace,” the organisation says.

Lockwood says the pool of workers available to industry has diminished. “Almost all our employers tell us they’re struggling to fill key posts. The workforce is ageing: there are lots of companies with talented, skilled people in their early 60s. What do they do next? Apprenticeships can provide workforce continuity.”

Seta delivers traditional engineering apprenticeships of up to three-and-a-half years, where most of the time is spent on on-the-job training. “We’re one of the original group training associations that was set up in the 1960s,” Lockwood says. “The key is to work with employers to make sure that training fits what they’re looking for.” The organisation has a contract with the Skills Funding Agency, which ensures that for 16-18 year-olds, apprenticeships are funded to level three. For 19-year-olds and over, firms are expected to provide half of the funding.

Companies are obliged to pay salaries to trainees. This can be a barrier to widespread adoption of apprenticeship programmes, especially for small employers. “It’s about empowering and equipping youngsters for a career in industry, where they have to graft,” says Lockwood.

M A N U F A C T U R I N G

32 OCTOBER 2014 PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING

Pump primer: Reverse-engineering at Pinnacle Re-Tec begins with scanning and CAD models

North East

IF WE DID ONLY CONSERVATIVE PROJECTS, THIS WOULDN’T BE AN EXCITING PLACE TO WORK

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