Friday, 26 August 2016

Memories of West Wind in the 1960s

Memories of West Wind in the 1960s

In the small group of pioneers who brought a new industry to life in the 1960s, was the youngest apprentice, Keith Fidgett, and it was the sad news that Keith had lost his wife Jean, brought the memories of those challenging days back to mind. The company, which started life as West Wind Turbines Ltd was founded in 1963, Britain's first generation of industrial tools including gas-lubricated bearings to design and manufacture, is performed based on the basic research at the University of Southampton. After supplying international markets with a number of spindles with air bearings, the company changed its name to Westwind air bearing, a name given is up today.

When Keith Fidgett the youngest was at West Wind in the 1960s, was Walter Kammerling is one of the oldest. A refugee from the Nazi takeover of Austria, Walter had come to England at the age of 16 and obtained professional qualifications in both the mechanical and electrical engineering. As chief engineer, he played a central role in the practical application of the new technology, and in 1964 he was the forty rotating senior member of a relatively young team. Now 91, Walter Kammerling has been published in the fate of Holocaust recently the harrowing story of his family. He had by his colleagues at Westwind for his high professional skills and total integrity in memory.

The secret air bearing manufacturing was a new level of precision engineering and to realize in the early days, involved the process at a level of honing perhaps fate never been achieved before. But the early gas-lubricated machines might never have been made with the required accuracy for the genius of Lesley Somers. Still the old imperial unit of inches in the 1960s with a bearing bore of a tenth of a thousandth of an inch in Lesley could match what he would happily call a quick thrill. Les, as he was known to his colleagues, was for many years the jovial Welsh heart of a precision manufacturing operation.

to play a key role in the development of new products was a development engineer Michael Sturm. A veteran of a gas lubrication test program at the Bristol Siddeley Engines Ltd., Mike came to West Wind technology in manufacturing applied to see. As an essential factor for the introduction of a series of innovative products, served Mike Tempest Westwind until retirement and has been retained as a consultant for several years after.

Few of the pioneers were mentioned but Westwind Air Bearings still manufactures high-speed precision micro hole drilling spindles for the worlds electronics industry and claims to command seventy percent of the global market. Most computers, mobile phones and other widespread electronic aids to modern life included micro holes drilled Westwind products. The company has thousands of person-years of employment and earned millions of pounds from exports, thanks to this happy band of pioneers and many worthy heirs provided that they succeeded.

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