| On the evening of Wednesday 14th November we had the opportunity of an evening visit to the Atlas Copco facility in Deeside (N Wales, Near Chester). The facility is known to many as “Henrob”. The main activities on site are the development and manufacture of Self Piercing Rivets (SPR) and the associated tooling. The main customer is Automotive (Did you know that the average car body shell contains 2,500.SRPs!!!!). Henrob was established in 1985 by Keith Jones who first saw SPR technology during a business visit to Australia and subsequently acquired the rights to the Technology. Henrob became part of the Atlas Copco group during 2014. The evening started with an excellent Hot Buffet (and desserts) which was followed by an introductory talk about Atlas Copco. The (Swedish Based) Atlas Copco group comprises 4 divisions, Compressed Air, Vacuum, Industrial Applications and Power. Henrob is part of the Industrial Applications Division. The group has a turnover of Euro 9Bn and has 34,000 employees. Henrob has 2 facilities, Deeside (UK) and New Hudson MI USA. In total these 2 facilities , employ 600 people, 285 of whom are based at Deeside. Henrob manufacture 4.5Bn Rivets per year. We were then given a tour of Rivet Manufacture, R&D and Tool manufacture. Rivet manufacture is a cold forging process followed by annealing, plating and sorting. The plating is carried out off site. The rivet manufacturing is highly automated, very few people were seen. It is a truly “Lean” operation with an excellent standard of house keeping. All rivets go through a highly automated, vision system based “double sorting” process to ensure that there is no possibility of a stray incorrect rivet being included in a bag (of 2,000) rivets. The R&D operation was equally impressive. There are 70 people employed in R&D covering new product development, technical support and tooling design. The R&D labs can develop, and manufacture prototype rivets. There was also an extensive testing facility. Tooling (For attachment to robots) is designed and manufactured in a separate building. Bought in castings are machined using very sophisticated CNC machines in a well equipped Machine shop. These then go to an assembly shop where a bewildering array of highly bespoke attachments, sensors etc are added to make a fully equipped tool ready to be attached to a robot. Each tool is, in effect, tailor made for a specific application. Overall this was an excellent visit with overwhelmingly positive feedback. A big THANK YOU to Tom Wright and the staff of Atlas Copco Deeside |