Where the weird meets the wonderful!

Mike Richardson visits Patterns & Moulds to hear how, as well as cementing its reputation in the construction industry, the company also produces master moulds for composite elements, including the manufacture of finished GRP mouldings.

Never afraid to take on some of the weird and wonderful projects the various industries can offer, Loughborough-based Patterns & Moulds can count a diverse range of projects – including the Parliament Building in Edinburgh and Crossrail in London - among its impressive roster of business wins.

Capable of manufacturing tooling using polyester, vinyl ester, rapid tooling systems and full epoxy resin laminates if required, the company also provides general purpose and fire-retardant finished components produced from polyester resins systems too. It offers a complete on-site installation package, as well as a full, one-stop shop - from design, including FEA and structural calculations, through patterns and tooling to production and erection.

Celebrating its 50^th anniversary in 2017, Patterns & Moulds is a regular fixture at the Advanced Engineering show, held at the NEC Birmingham and buys into the show’s ethos in that bringing a range of different industries together under one roof can help promote the kinds of synergies and cross-pollination that no-one would have thought possible.

“Our core business has always been connected to the manufacture of moulds for precast concrete,” director, Gary Lucas begins. “These moulds have often been made predominantly from timber or fibreglass, plus a mixture of PU and silicone rubber. Back in 2002, a key customer of ours at the time picked up the Parliament Building project: one of the first buildings to be constructed using a computer-aided modelling software package.

“We’d meet with the architect who would share drawing files of what the building was supposed to look like. This process of having to manually manage lots of drawings drove us towards computerisation in terms of using AutoCAD modelling and design software. Eventually, we saw the limitations of AutoCAD, so we began looking for a more bespoke 3D software package, because by then we had realised it would make our job much easier. It amazed us how quickly we could run with something like SolidWorks - it’s so user-friendly and intuitive. We now have six seats and it saves us hours of unnecessary work compared to previous CAD packages. Nearly everything we manufacture goes straight into our CAD drawing office where it’s drawn up, modelled, approved and signed off. It enables us to eliminate any issues ‘on screen’ before they become a problem during manufacture.”

The appliance of science

The application of CAD techniques also drove Lucas into buying a 5-axis CNC router because of the increasingly weird and wonderful shapes the company was being driven to manufacture.

“Alongside our GRP business we started machining master patterns for other projects on the mould side which has grown to the point where we now have four 5-axis CNC machines. Our first two - which we still own, are Multiax machines – great machines, very reliable and still doing a great job. However, we started looking for a large CNC machine, and by speaking to several machine tool manufacturers, we chose CMS because they put together a very sound technical package and presentation, plus their machine offered very good value-for-money.

“A key driver for me at the time was that CMS’ UK facility was located nearby in Nottingham where they hold a range of spares and a service team that are always readily available. Our preventative maintenance agreements mean that if something does go wrong, CMS will get to us either the same day or the next to support us. We also purchased a CMS Antares machine at a time when I was in desperate need of more machining capacity. Fortunately, CMS had a machine that would be available imminently, so we ordered it and it was installed and commissioned very quickly.”

According to Lucas, when it comes to the kinds of demands placed on the company by its customers, so much of it these days is about establishing a partnership between customer and supplier.

“It’s all about working together, getting an understanding and having the level of relationship where you almost know what people want before they actually tell you. It pays dividends and it is the way we like to operate. We’re a small family-run business, we rely on our customers and we don’t manufacture any stock items ourselves. We try and build up relationships with customers where we can have open and frank conversations. It’s about understanding exactly what the finished part is and where it’s going to be used and what it is for and then ensuring that the tooling is appropriate for it.

“Cost is important, but over and above this, quality, service, backup and accuracy are the real driving forces, and this has been reflected in the purchase of a Creaform MetraSCAN 750 Elite 3D scanner system for the inspection and verification of parts – both in process and during manufacture. We can now laser scan components and produce inspection reports in-house: even before the job is delivered, we’ve proven it is correct - and we can release the inspection report alongside the part.”

Power to the people

Gary’s wife, office manager Kate Lucas believes the company’s number one asset is its employees, and feels fortunate to have an incredibly strong and stable workforce – many employees have been with the company for many years.

“It’s not uncommon for an employee of ours to be celebrating 30-35 years of employment – they start and they stay! We’ve got a great team and this is a testament to the fact that we have a happy place in which to work. Many of our employees thrive on diversity and work here because no two jobs are ever the same. We’re always experimenting in terms of whether there is a different way of doing something. This goes a long way for some of the customers as well; they return to us because they know we are willing to go the extra mile.

“When you exhibit at events like the Advanced Engineering show, you tend to be in a bubble. We’d walk around the show aisles and think that we’d never normally put ourselves in this kind of environment in terms of all the different things we see on show – it really made us see things from a completely different perspective. There are a lot of healthy synergies between different sectors using different technologies and as a result, a lot of healthy cross-pollination too!”

We end our day’s discussion by summing up exactly what it is that differentiates Patterns & Moulds from the competition and why a customer uses the company over their nearest rivals.

“We’ve never been scared to look at the weird and wonderful,” Gary concludes. “It is where much of our work is focused and we have built a reputation of being the company of choice if you are looking for extremely large and/or extremely complicated project work. We’ve got a really good team and the fact that we encompass 3D modelling techniques - plus the CNC machining - allows us to really slice and dice the project work so that any complex elements are processed on our CNC machines, whilst the conventional side can be built conventionally by hand, and then we bring those two elements together. We can make some really complex, weird and wonderful shapes and bring them together very easily and cost-effectively.”

www.patternsandmoulds.co.uk