There’s a lot of talk about British manufacturing at the moment – and I think we all know why. Whichever side of the B****t fence you sit on, Litchfield’s policy is very clear – to continue to invest heavily in home-grown engineering to allow us to engineer the best products and conversions in the market place.
Since the inception of the company back in 1997, we have always looked to invest in great British engineering talent. Not only internally, as the workshop and engineering divisions have expanded over the years, but also with the myriad companies that we work with, in order to productionise our new designs and higher volume items.
These days, every new design begins in-house, with our own R&D team, engineers and fabricators. Solving a tuning problem and creating a bespoke solution is very much the ‘day-to-day’ for our 25-strong team, with our ability to rapidly prototype in-house saving us massive amounts of development and testing time. Low volume specialist items are all created here. Starting with a CAD design, or even just a series of initial sketches, our head fabricator Scott uses a variety of artisan techniques to shape, weld, form and create all manner of intricate components.
For products and parts that will be produced in higher numbers however, we rely heavily on a hand-picked network of technical partners across the UK. This plethora of top-end engineering outfits vary in size and style, but they all have one thing very much in common; they’re the very best at what they do, in many cases being motorsport and aerospace suppliers. It’s thankfully still a very welcome cliché that when it comes to white coated boffins and boiler-suited geniuses toiling away in industrial units creating fabulous ‘widgets’ – the UK is still very much the powerhouse of the world. It’s perhaps no coincidence that many of the world’s finest motorsport teams are still based here in the UK.
Stick a pin in a map of the British Isles and chances are you won’t have landed too far away from one of our technical partners. Our customs radiator and intercooler cores are made in Leicester. Our precision laser cutting is lovingly handled in Hereford – and a stack of our beautifully crafted alloy components are hand finished in Gloucester…
And there there’s alloy production and fabrication in Cinderford, CNC cutting and CAD modelling in Silverstone and 3D Scanning in Northampton. In the North, our custom exhausts are fabricated in Yorkshire. In total, our products support over 20 British engineering businesses, helping to maintain countless skilled staff.
Going forward, we’ll continue to invest in the very best of UK design, manufacturing and technology. British engineering continues to be a real success story, and we’re very proud to play our small part.
