Mollart Engineering to invest £250,000-plus at Resolven facility

"We have invested over £1.3 million over the last four years to progressively grow the business from £500,000 to over £4 million turnover and taken the company to be ranked in the top three CNC machine shops in South Wales," stated managing director Guy Mollart. "Most important to meet the demands of new contracts, we are now spending £100,000 to construct two areas of 30 m by 20 m within the machine shop that are purpose-designed to be an inspection room and clean room for assembly tasks." The Resolven facility is a major supplier to customers in the semiconductor, medical, subsea, telecoms and oil and gas exploration businesses. In the last 12 months. Mollart's Resolven facility has taken on complete supply of high value, regular quantities of special filter chamber assemblies containing 15 parts for the medical industry. Its semiconductor business has been significantly boosted including supply of 60 variants of a very high value assembly containing 35 components, under a supply chain management contract, and the specialist machining of titanium components has been introduced for the nuclear industry. "We have also recently won an important 'first' for us in an export contract for an aerospace company in America where we have to produce very high quality close tolerance special light fittings," explained plant manager Wayne Thomas. Under Mr Mollart, the Resolven operation was originally set up in 1998, supported by a grant, to supply subcontract automotive components based on the parent company's deep hole drilling expertise for which the expected volumes never materialised. The decision was made in 2005 to diversify. An initial £2 million was invested to set up the high technology based multi-axis modern machining capability. The facility was modelled on the Mollart headquarters manufacturing plant in Chessington, where deep hole drilling machine tools and production systems are designed and built for sale around the world, while, in addition, it was to be a source of specialised tooling and subcontract machining. Indeed, the Resolven investment was also to provide a controlled overflow capability as subcontract orders grew in Chessington. However, motivated by a chance to succeed in the local area, Mr Thomas led the diversification into producing components of very high value and involving very complex machining strategies. With the initial success, he was able to argue his case and, as a result, won additional investment, which has led to the current record order books. As part of the 2011/12 budget, Resolven has already installed a new Wenzel co-ordinate measuring machine, with a 2.5 m Y axis, 1 m in X and 750 mm in Z; a further CNC turn-mill centre is about to be ordered; while two mass spectrometers, a thermal coating process and two additional specialised welding booths are being set up. In addition, a kit-marshall area for components ready for assembly is being established where they can be securely held ready for build.