PARAGON TOOLMAKING
PARAGON TOOLMAKING HAS BEEN PROVIDING TOOLS FOR OVER 50 YEARS, AND SO UNDERSTANDS THE IMPORTANCE OF NURTURING THE NEXT GENERATION OF SKILLED WORKERS.
AS GOOD AS ITS TOOLS
PROJECT MANAGED BY: DEAN BROWN
Paragon Toolmaking was founded in 1969 by Carl Canty. It has changed hands a couple of times since then, most recently being purchased by Daniel Beaumont, son of former England rugby union and British Lions captain Bill Beaumont, but whoever owns the company, it has built itself a reputation producing essential tooling, used to manufacture parts for some of the world’s best-known products and brands.
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oday the firm employs 18 people to design and manufacture tooling to produce components for firms from Ideal Boilers to automanufacturers like Jaguars, Nissan, Land Rover, and BMW. “We typically manufacture for the UK, although we have some tools going out to China, America, and Japan,” points out Paragon’s General Manager, Kevin Batty. “We are a subcontractor, producing tools for a wide range of business sectors including automotive, aerospace, building products, white goods, and many more. One of the companies we work for is a manufacturer of sinks and hobs for the leisure industry, used in caravans and motorhomes. We also carry out repair work on their tools.”
158 | MANUFACTURING
Paragon manufactures these tools at its facilities in Hull, which end up in a wide range of products and brands around the world, offering a full service. “We start at the beginning, with the design concept. We look at the customers’ products and components and understand what they are trying to make, we then work with them to determine what changes might be required to make it manufacturable,” Batty explains. The next step is the tool design, after customer approval we manufacture the component parts, assemble the tool, and test it, all tools are fully tested before shipment to the customer. As a business, we offer the full service from concept through to commissioning the tool at the customer’s site”.