Darrell Hughes founded South Yorkshire Saw & Tool Co in 1974 as a small saw blade sharpening and ancillary supply company. Wind forward almost 50 years from the inception of a company working out of a two-bay garage and the transformation of the Doncaster-based company is beyond comprehension. Everything has changed. The company name, the facility, the industries served and the manufacturing processes.In fact, the only remaining constants are the long-serving personnel, family ownership and sharpening technology from Vollmer UK.

Changing its name in 1992 to Systco Unilap, the saw blade sharpening company acquired its first Vollmer machine in the late 1970s and has bought a complete suite of German-built machines over the years. To manufacture the countless product lines with thousands of new, re-sharpened and serviced tools delivered every week, the company has 11 Vollmer machines.Three arrived in 2022.

With 25% annual post-Covid expansion in traditional markets and growth in new segments, Unilap needed capacity, hence its investment in a Vollmer CHX840 with HS loading system in April 2022. Quickly following this machine was a Vollmer QXD250 with HC5 loader in July, with a Vgrind 260 with HC4 loading system arriving in October of the same year.

The reasoning behind the CHX840 and the QXD250 was simple. Unilap purchased the automated CHX840 saw blade sharpening machine to add unmanned ‘lights-out’ running and alleviate capacity on the 22-employee company’s other saw blade manufacturing and servicing machines. Likewise, Unilap already had a nine-year-old Vollmer QXD200 machine running around the clock, so upgrading to a brand-new QXD250 would add capacity and support rapid growth in the metalworking industry.

For further information www.vollmer-group.com

The arrival of three new Behringer saws at British Steel’s Skinningrove service centre will herald a major new milestone in its development.The £2.2m equipment will be a pivotal part of the operation, bringing increased productivity, greater accuracy and more intuition to the whole process of making special profiles for customers.

The £26m centre will include cut-to-length lines, product milling, machining and warehousing operations, and will enable British Steel to make and process an extended range of value-added profiles for the forklift industry.

The process of making sure special profiles meet requirements involves cutting down 14m bars, where accuracy is critical. The new saws will automate the process, deliveringmore precisionandthree times more speed than the previous saws.The advanced milling and machining capability will mean British Steel can offer profiles with tolerances of just 0.1mm.

Project manager at the Skinningrove service centre, Stuart Webster, says: “The new saws and product transportation systems that Behringer are providing will be integral to our facility.They will allow Skinningrove Special Profiles to move into the next phase ofanticipated market development in forklift mast sales. The saws will also significantly improve our capability to cut all products faster and meet tighter tolerances that satisfy the developing requirements of our customer base.”

British Steel’sspecial profiles business manufactures 250,000 tonnes of specialist products for a range of sectors, including the material handling market, of which the “profitable and growing” market for forklift trucks is a part.

For further information www.britishsteel.co.uk