Irwin record tools sheffield

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What's new. New posts. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. This is the former William Ridgway Tools factory site. William Ridgway and Sons company of Sheffield, manufacturers of augers, bits, wood-boring and motorising tools, was founded in and became a Private company in , these works were founded in the s.

Record were another Sheffield company who were renowned for the quality of their vices and industrial clamps. A later merger with a woodwork tools company called Marple which was part-owned by Record and Ridgeway respectively before their original merger led to the company becoming known as Record Marples Tools. Despite a management buyout leading to the company reverting to British ownership in the company struggled financially and following administration was acquired by U.

I explored this gaff with ACID- REFLUX a couple of months back, to be honest there isn't much evidence of the old tool making business left, it's more of an art gallery now which is absolutely fine by me, especially given that some of Phlegm's best work is hidden in there : It's a dirty old place with more pigeons than you can shake a stick at and there's a couple of cool rooftops to get up on.

Vices, Wrenches, Cramps and tools alike were produced in the factory during the first 30 years of the 20th century, then in the 's Record made a move in a new direction, they started making hand planes. In January , Record launched a new line of adjustable iron planes.

These hand planes were to line up in direct competition with the dominant tool maker Stanley USA. Stanley had a long history of making innovative, user-friendly, affordable planes and their new wave of planes were proving a huge success. As such many tool sellers in the UK had for a number of years been importing Stanley planes into their shops. With the display of these tools on shop shelves and shop brochures and the distinct lack of competition of similar planes, these Stanley planes had become a familiar name amongst many carpenters.

The launch of these planes at this time just happened to be a time at the start of the Great Depression, it was also at a time when nations were implementing protectionism strategies. As a consequence there were retaliation policies put in place. These barriers between nations meant there was an increased sense of national pride. This meant although times were unbelievably tough, it meant British makers now had an edge over foreign makers and for Record this was a great opportunity to seize some of the metal hand plane market share which Stanley had pretty much owned.

The vast majority of the Record plane designs were quite similar to the Stanley equivalent models of the time and so was the numbering of the models. The model numbers given were very cleverly numbered so to give the Record models a unique model number but so it was very straight forward for potential customers to compare each respective Record and Stanley plane model against each other.

The clever part of the model numbering was simply to place a '0' before each Stanley equivalent model number. Factory staff all wore a light brown overall. Retired workers got paid a company monthly pension and on the last Friday of each month all these retirees would queue up outside the Wages office and pick up a brown envelope which contained just a few quid per month pension.

Dronfield was then the main factory where all the tools were produced and nothing had been made at Main City Centre since at least Bernard was the Manager at Stubley Lane [Dronfield] and this Works was in existence at the same time as the City Centre, but was later used by JVC as a sales Room where some of their machines were on display.

Mr Peter was a nice person and was always dressed very smartly in suits made for him by Barney Goodman, a Jewish tailor in Sheffield. He always liked dark blue suits, wore modern day ties and enjoyed his wine! Mr Jim was a quiet man who you would expect to see sat in his garden wearing a wool cardigan! But Col. Fenton, Peter and Jim must have still owned the land and buildings and Hampton Ridgways had some deal which they could do with a property developer but could not cement the deal because they did not own the land and buildings.

At this time I think that Jim and Fenton were both weary of running the place. Mr Peter was pointed to finally move it all to Hampton Ridgways.