STAFF who have clocked up almost 200 years' service between them are retiring from a Yorkshire casting company this year. Five employees at Pennine Castings , previously known as Blakey's Malleable Castings , are retiring after working at the company for a combined 191 years. The latest person to retire is sales manager Roy Whiteley, who left at the age of 65 after clocking up 50 years of service. Later…

Castings has unveiled plans for a new foundry production line in Derbyshire to satisfy a high level of demand. The new £17m line at its William Lee site in Dronfield will be funded from internal resources and add up to 12,000 tonnes of foundry capacity. Expected to be commissioned within the next two years, it is hoped the additional facility will enable Castings to meet the demand for its heavy truck parts…

The foundry and machining group Castings plc reported today that it had been hit by a double whammy of the downturn in the automotive sector and the demise of Icelandic banks and would be cutting staff and delaying the start-up of a new foundry at its South Yorkshire subsidiary Wm. Lee. Announcing the company’s half year financial results, chairman Brian Cooke said pre-tax profit for the period ended 30…

Dale Lister is managing director of a firm that will restore your faith in an export-led recovery. He spoke to Deputy Business Editor Greg Wright. IT’S always nice to be told that you’ve chosen an industry with a future. Back in 1977, Dale Lister might have been forgiven for thinking that he’d made a terrible mistake. On his first day in a foundry business, the 16-year-old Mr Lister attended a college…

Lestercast foundry in the UK. Metal casting foundries as we know them have been around since the 1800s. It’s a proven process; liquid metal is poured into a mould which is then removed once cooled to leave a cast solid metal shape from the mould cavity. The principle remains the same today but modern casting techniques have come in to make the process more efficient, cleaner and better quality. Additive…

As an official supplier to America's Cup team Land Rover BAR and member of the Technical Innovation Group, which brought the best of British engineering together to develop advanced technologies for the team and provide them with a competitive edge, Renishaw has provided metal additive manufacturing (AM) and encoder technology expertise for the team's racing catamaran. The Renishaw additive manufacturing…

Scientists from the University of Birmingham have described how microscopic crystals grow and change shape in molten metals as they cool, in research that is breaking new ground in alloy research and paves the way for improving the tensile strength of alloys used in casting and welding. Their research, published today in Acta Materialia, used high-speed synchrotron X-ray tomography to ‘photograph’ the…

If there’s one thing you can say about Whitechapel it is that it has a lot of history, some of it of a certain flavour. Jack the Ripper and the Kray twins plied their trades round here. The Elephant Man was displayed in a freak show on the main street, before being taken to live in the nearby Royal London Hospital. The brown-coloured, second-cheapest neighbourhood on the original Monopoly board is the…

Rio Tinto Alcan will close the Lynemouth aluminium smelter in Northumberland, England on March 29th 2012. Closure follows an extensive period of consultation with employee representatives. Mr Jacynthe Côté CFO of Rio Tinto Alcan said that "I am saddened by the closure of Lynemouth Smelter but we have reached this decision only after a thorough strategic review of the plant and a fair and transparent…

Rolls-Royce (R-R) and Airbus have completed a critical design review (CDR) for the Trent XWB-97 engine destined for the A350-1000. The XWB-97 is designed to generate the higher thrust needed by the A350-1000 without any increases to the size of the nacelle used on the A350-800/900, and without impacting the specific fuel consumption or on-wing life of the engine. To solve this conundrum, the larger engine…