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I walked through the doors of the Mettoy factory in
September 1977 and the first thing that hit me was the smell, a
mixture of zinc, plastic and solvents from the paint - a smell
that was to become so familiar over the years. It lingered
throughout the factory and with practise each time you entered
the factory you could detect the slight changes, sometime as a
result of production problems. Week smells of solvents meant the
paint machine wasn’t running correctly, a strong smell of PVC
usually meant that a plastic machine was being purged.There were several factories situated on 14 acres of land, each built at different times to deal with the expansion of the company , the site was originally a railway siding. About half of the factory on the Swansea site was dedicated to the production of Corgi diecast products with the rest making a whole variety of items from record players to plastic railway sets and movie viewers. One of the factories was making Fisher Price toys under contract and ten miles down the road was a smaller unit helping in the assembly of these items. The first
Mettoy factory in the UK was in Northampton and this now
produced Wembley footballs, kites, plastic based items and
contract diecasting for a whole range of companies. This was an
engineering based company with many skilled people.It was 7.30am in the morning and my first departmental training was in the Industrial Engineering Department with Ken (he’s still with us at Oxford). I was given a clipboard and a stop watch and each day for the next two months I carried out the cycle checks in the Plastic department monitoring the efficiency of the machines. There were 50 in total and each had to be timed after which I would check the condition of the plastic components to ensure all the pieces were coming off correctly. The setting of the machine was so important and with over 10,000 moulds a very skilled job. Through these first few months I was able to build up an understanding of the workings of the machine and some of the problems involved with plastics.
