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The
History
Saint-Gobain
Abrasives, Staverton was formed from three companies: Van Moppes, originally
from London and Basingstoke, Impregnated Diamond Products based in Gloucester,
and Winter Diamond Tools, a satellite sales office of the Winter Group,
originally based in Harlow, Essex
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Van Moppes - IDP
By 1981,
Van Moppes and IDP were sharing research and development, sales and
marketing resources at the Tuffley site. As a result of the recession and
over-capacity, the Basingstoke factory was closed and production
consolidated in
Gloucester
. Many staff moved from
Basingstoke
and several entirely new product lines, such as Rotary Truers, were
established.
In 1997,
the Unicorn group was acquired by Saint-Gobain Abrasives. In 2001 the
business changed its name to Saint-Gobain Abrasives Ltd and merged with
Winter Diamond Tools Ltd.
Winter Diamond Tools
Ernst
Winter & Son started as a family owned business in
Germany
in 1847. It has remained the world’s largest Diamond and CBN tool
manufacturer. Winter was the first company to apply diamond industrially and
has made many innovations over the years, particularly in the metal and
resin bonded tools it developed. It has been a family business through 4
generations until January 1996 when it was acquired by the Saint-Gobain
group of companies. The
UK
operation, Winter Diamond Tools was formed in August 1983, based in
Enfield
. In 1990 the offices were relocated to a bigger building in Harlow,
Essex
where it could stock more products and improve its market share. In June
2001 the company was merged with Van Moppes in
Gloucester
to create the new company Saint-Gobain Abrasives Ltd.
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Van Moppes
LM Van Moppes & Sons
can be traced back to the arrival of Louis Meyer Van Moppes from
Amsterdam
in 1893. He set up a diamond merchant business in
London
and 21 years later established a small factory to manufacture tools for
optical glass and stone grinding. The business prospered and offices were
opened abroad, forming the basis of the current group of companies. In 1950,
the company moved from
London
to a specially built factory in
Basingstoke
.
The Unicorn group
acquired Van Moppes during the 1970s and in 1981, transferred the
manufacturing business to occupy the same site as Impregnated Diamond Products
in Tuffley,
Gloucester.
Impregnated Diamond Products (IDP)
The origins of IDP can be
found in
Antwerp
in 1932. Peter Neven patented a process for combining crushed industrial
diamond ("Boart") with iron and other metal powders through heating
the mixture to the sintering point and pressing. A company, Societe Anonyme
Produit Boart, was formed to exploit this process. Production continued at the
Antwerp
plant until the early part of World War II when Peter Neven, his key staff and
plant were transferred to
Gloucester
by the Admiralty in order to protect the supply of key consumables for the
manufacture of Radar components.
It was a dramatic move,
completed less than a month before the German invasion of
Belgium
and involving stripping down the plant in less than two weeks and transporting
it across a heavily mined
North Sea
.
One of the by-products of
IDP diamond wheel production was the invention of a process known as Spark
Erosion, or Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM). This is a process used in
many industries, world wide, particularly where phenomenal accuracy or
machining of very hard materials are required. For a long time IDP
manufactured machines under the “Sparcatron” brand and even expanded their
factory to accommodate this.
IDP was acquired by the
Unicorn group in the 1970s.
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Saint-Gobain Abrasives
In 2002,
the newly named Saint-Gobain Abrasives moved to a new site in Staverton, in
Gloucester
, 7 miles away from the original Tuffley site which had been occupied for
the previous 63 years. This new
site has been totally re-fitted and designed to provide much improved
manufacturing flows and processes. There
are approximately 80 people employed on the site, covering sales,
manufacturing, engineering, finance and R&D.
With our
new corporate brand, improved production facilities and expert staff we look
forward to a prosperous future providing abrasives to industry.
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