Editor’s comment: July 2017

But I’m not going to talk about that anymore, because on the Friday after the election, tooling specialist Guhring opened its new 3.5 acre manufacturing plant in Aston, Birmingham. This was a very happy occasion. Around 180 guests attended the event to celebrate the conclusion of ‘four years of hard graft’ as described by Guhring UK’s managing director, Mike Dinsdale.

Guhring UK was established in 1973 and was the first subsidiary to be set-up outside Germany. Forty four years on, the new development cost a whopping £12 million to build but it makes Guhring one of the UK’s largest cutting tool manufacturers with plenty of room available to expand its production and coating of specialised carbide, HSS and PCD tooling products.

At the official opening ceremony – with ribbon cutting duties performed by Dr Joerg Guhring, chairman of the Guhring Group – the company also announced a collaboration with the Engineering Technology Group through a new Technology Academy – a dedicated area within the facility for proving machining processes, tooling development and R&D. Nakamura-Tome and Bridgeport machine tools from ETG are already installed.

But the overwhelmingly positive thing that resonated with me above everything else on the day was that this isn’t Germany, France, China, Taiwan or the US – this is Birmingham UK, a city steeped in manufacturing heritage. Our manufacturing prowess may have been severely hit over the decades but it was truly inspirational to see Guhring committing so heavily to a tradition so firmly embedded in the region’s psyche.

Even more significant was the fact that Guhring UK financed this venture themselves with a little help from Lloyds Bank. This was saving for a rainy and then some – except it didn’t rain, the sun shone!

Dave Tudor Editor