Last night we hosted a very successful Careers Open Evening attended by over 60 parents and students. The evening offered a variety of short tours led by all our apprentices, and product demonstrations. On hand were engineering staff from various process streams including support functions to talk to visitors about why Norbar is a great place to work and job opportunities.We had lots of enquiries for our 2017 intake of apprenticeships together with some of our other job opportunities we are offe...

Nearly 6 months after the British public voted narrowly in favour of Brexit it still seems to be unclear exactly what we hoped to achieve in voting to leave the European Union (EU). Hardly a day goes past without Brexit featuring in the news in some context or other and yet we are none the wiser when it comes to understanding what our future relationship with the EU will be. Theresa May has promised to trigger Article 50 (the section of the Lisbon Treaty which needs to be invoked for us to leave...

2016 was a momentous year for Norbar. It was a year in which we left our home of the previous 34 years and moved to a larger site across Banbury at Wildmere Road. It was also a year in which our oil and gas orientated distributors continued to struggle to find business leaving us with a gap to fill in our gearbox and engineer to order departments. As it turned out, it would take most of the year to replace that oil and gas business but certainly for our gearbox product process things were lookin...

Those of you who have read my previous blogs and especially my March 2016 update will know that there are lots of changes to ISO 6789 coming at the end of the year. In our ISO Working Group, the combined experts from several international manufacturers and calibration accreditation bodies have created a comprehensive standard for the traceable calibration of both setting and indicating torque tools. ISO6789 part 2 is completely new and we have put thousands of hours of work into it. We know...

One of the things about getting old is that you remember stuff from long ago. As we started packing our boxes at Beaumont Road we found an original blueprint of the 1965 alterations to our first building in North Bar Place. It brought back memories of that first premises. I can shut my eyes and see the stairs up to the offices, with Grandfathers office at the top on the left and the general office a few steps down to the right where my father Ian worked. That memory made me wonder what Grandfath...

Norbar has been going independently to the Cologne Fair for about 27 years now and probably for 20 years before that sharing a stand with our distributor so we have seen a lot of changes. The significant change this year was the drop from four days to three for the event. Strangely, we still started on Sunday; it was the Wednesday that was dropped! Whether the three day show was a good decision was certainly something that exhibitors and visitors were talking about. From a visitors point of view...

As new staff members join Norbar, they each have an induction session with the three Directors and my induction session is centred around the Norbar brand and marketing. Following one of these inductions, a lady joining our electronic production team asked if she could see me because she had a marketing idea. Much as I love ideas I approach them with some trepidation because it is often the case that the idea will be unworkable for a variety of reasons such as cost and limited likely impact bein...

Over the years I have been involved in the recruitment of many CNC Setters. During the interview process I will usually walk candidates around the CNC machine shop explaining what equipment we have available and the type of work we do, the examples I show them are usually accompanied by the comment “it’s not rocket science”. I am still not entirely sure for whose benefit I say it. Is it for my own in the hope that my dismissal of the difficulty will impress the prospective cand...

Having recently embarked on a project to gain ISO50001 (Energy Management System) accreditation, a question I’ve been posed a few times has been, Yeah, but I turn the light off when I leave isn’t that enough?Well, what is ISO50001 and what is an Energy Management System? ISO50001 is the international standard for Energy Management Systems and within this standard it defines Energy Management Systems as such: To enable an organisation to follow a systematic approach in achieving ...

Torque wrenches are common place across a variety of industrial processes, commercial garages and even homes wherever there is a precision assembly process utilising threaded fasteners. Considering their widespread use however, there remains a number of things that people get wrong or simply don’t know.