“We are more than happy to help make a difference” - Todmorden firm’s visors helping protect frontline NHS staff

An engineering firm in Todmorden is helping the frontline fight against coronavirus by producing hundreds of thousands of protective visors
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Canteen Smithy Engineering quickly reacted to the crisis by producing special visors to be used by medical staff on coronavirus wards in hospitals.

The company has made around 100,000 so far, despite only starting the project at the beginning of the month.

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Bryan Hickman, 55, went to work at Canteen Smithy straight from school aged 16 and bought the company in 2000, moving it to the current premises about 16 years ago.

Bryan HickmanBryan Hickman
Bryan Hickman

He said: “I’d spoken to my in-house designer to ask what we could do to help out.

“We can’t produce masks but anything plastic, which they tried to ban 12 months ago, we can do, so we talked about making a visor.

“We drew up a component, basically like headbands without the caps the golfers wear, with holes in it which you could mount a visor on to.

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“We found a guy called Chris Grilli down in London who was 3D printing headguards, and when I rang him, this was on Friday, April 3, he was going into a meeting with Nissan, who his brother works for. They’d expressed an interest in helping.

Some of the personal protective equipmentSome of the personal protective equipment
Some of the personal protective equipment

“I told him about this product we’d come up with and he said ‘that’d be amazing, we need ten thousand by next Friday’, which was in seven days’ time.

“So we got in touch with suppliers for materials we needed and started cutting on the Monday morning.

“Two or three of our staff came in, even though it was a Bank Holiday, because they were happy to help out, and we got underway.

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“Our designer David was working flat out from home along with supporting his wife and his poorly father-in-law who had just been discharged from hospital and many of our staff have also pulled out all the stops to get this project through from design to production as quickly as possible.

“It just shows what a fabulous team we have here and how British engineering can shine in the darkest of times for the UK.

“We ended up with an injection mould and by Friday morning we were running with a 25 second cycle time.

“Over a 24 hour period we could produce about 7,200 parts.

“Meanwhile, Nissan have taken on the job of finding the visor screens, so they’re collecting the parts from me, taking them up to Sunderland, bagging them with the appropriate visors and headbands, and distributing them around the NHS.

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“But the predicted number needed went up from ten thousand to fifty thousand.

“One of my customers, What More UK in Accrington, said ‘bring the product over, we’ll produce it and we’ll just charge you whatever it costs’.

“So they’re doing that now 24 hours a day while I started on a second tool, because the orders then took another surge to 100,000.

“This second tool is a four-impression tool rather than a two-impression, so we can make four every 25 seconds, thinking the order is going to go up again.

“We have capacity to produce 150,000 headbands a week.”

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Mr Hickman said he is happy to be contributing to the collective effort against coronavirus, and hopes his product makes a difference to staff on the frontline.

“I went to the medical centre and the staff seemed interested in the product when I started telling them what we were making, so I called back with some visors for them and they seemed really pleased.

“We are putting in all of our efforts to keep up with the required numbers and are more than happy to help make a difference in the fight against coronavirus for our front line NHS staff.

“If it makes a difference to one person then something good has come out of all of this.

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“We are extremely proud of the expertise within the company and the other British companies that we are working alongside.”

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