Foundry forging ahead

Chamberlin & Hill Castings is part of a £40 million turnover group that is set to grow and grow under the motto "difficult things done well".

The original foundry, based on the same Chuckery Road, Walsall site as its parent company Chamberlin plc, is now a market leader in the production of complex parts for the automotive and hydraulics industry.

At the helm of the parent company is chief executive Tim Hair, who makes no secret of the fact that he intends to grow the business by acquisition.

"For the last 12 years I have been involved in company turnarounds of one flavour or another, mostly engineering companies, and most of them in significant difficulties.

"What brought me to Walsall was the opportunity, having spent years fixing businesses, to build a group around the four businesses that make up Chamberlin that are doing difficult things. I saw Chamberlin as an opportunity to, by acquisition, build a credible advanced engineering group using the 'difficult things done well' philosophy," he said.

Those four businesses are the Walsall foundry, Russell Ductile Castings in Leicester and Scunthorpe, Cannock-based Fred Duncombe and Petrel Ltd, of Kitts Green in Birmingham.

"We are looking for firms with at least £10 million turnover, and ideally bigger, so we can bolt on some fairly significant lumps to the business. It is about adding value; we are not interested in going from a £40 million business to a £45 million one.

"I listen to people who write off the UK manufacturing industry, and if they are talking about providing capacity they are right. Sooner or later someone, somewhere else in the world is going to do it cheaper.

"But in an engineering company you are providing expertise, whether in the shape of a product in the shape of the process know-how – something that we do and which is very, very difficult to replicate. If you do the difficult things, and do them well, you can make money," he added.

Each of the four businesses has its own managing director, and Adam Vicary is the man behind Chamberlin & Hill Castings, having been with the company for nearly 20 years.

"I never tire of the foundry game and find it absolutely fascinating. The company was founded in the 1800s and began producing ironmongery and toys sold on the local market. The toys were typically of thin section cast iron that had shapes made by using sand cores.

"The ability to produce thin section with cores created the new market of meat mincers, and then came large water pumps for agricultural vehicles which required thin sections and complex sand cores," he said.

The requirement of high pressure sensitivity as well as thin section and complex cores opened up a gap in the oil pump market, and then advances in material technologies saw the foundry producing power steering pumps.

"Our main products here in Walsall now are in environmental control for passenger cars. Turbocharger parts start off complicated, and with the EU4 emissions legislation become even more so.

"We are now producing the first EU5 products that go into the Renault diesel engine, and if you're buying a new Porsche, make sure it's a turbocharged model, because one of its key parts will have been made in Walsall," he said.

The foundry typically produces around 150,000 castings a week, 60 per cent exported to the main markets of Poland, Germany, Slovakia, France and Hungary – and which eventually end up at Mercedes and Porsche and Audi, and in turn in VW, Skoda and Seat, who all share the same engine technology, while hydraulics products go to market leaders including CAT, JCB and Yamazaki.