Sales Manager for Kepston’s Wednesbury facility Alan McCracken says: “We had to invest in a new furnace as old line was ten years old and while it was still giving excellent quality it had reached full capacity. The size restraints on the old furnace also meant that certain opportunities were closed to us. Now we have the new furnace we taking on larger components from existing customers and have gained work from new customers that we would not have been able to use us in the past because their parts would not fit through the opening of the old furnace.

“We actually had to move an existing line of furnace and build an extension to accommodate this new investment.

“We have other flat mesh belt furnaces, but you need a humpback style furnace for hydrogen brazing. The hydrogen rises to the highest part of the furnace – the hump – it would just pour out of a flat furnace. And you need the dry hydrogen to do copper and nickel brazing of stainless steel assemblies, as well as the bright annealing of austenitic stainless steel and the hardening of certain grades of martensitic stainless steel.”

The Kepston Group offers subcontract brazing, bright annealing, magnetic annealing and precision grinding from sites at Wednesbury and Aldridge in the UK and Lubenice in the Czech Republic.