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Neill Tools - Not any more!


dunsbyowl1867

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Terrible news to hear one of the last surviving Sheffield names going. However their products like so many others are a pale imitation of those obtainable years ago. Health and Safety concerns nowadays mean that hand tools are tempered so far back that maintaining a keen edge for longer than a few minutes use is no longer possible. My best wood chisels are made from old high-carbon hand files, ground and hardened and tempered glass hard. I wouldn't let anyone else use them and they're no good for opening paint tins but at least they keep an edge.

HD

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What actually happened. Neill Tools was bought out by a French company. The segmental saw machinery was shipped to France, then the part at Cannock that made Britool spanners was turned into a warehouse for made in France Facom spanners. The garden tool factory by the M6 at Wallsall ran for a number of years until a site plan showing office blocks on the site was pinned to the gatehouse wall, then closed about 1 year later. The metal work for spades was then forged in India to have the wooden handles fitted in Sheffield. From then on more and more products were outsourced from China and just finished off in Sheffield. I remember one manager there telling me they scrapped between 25 and 33% of the product coming in from China for poor quality. That left mainly Eclipse hacksaw and Spear and Jackson handsaw production as the main products of Sheffield. The machines making the Spear & Jackson handsaws was then transferred to Taiwan. Finally the French company sold Neill Tools to a Chinese business man who then made a visit to see what he had bought. At the end of the first week he gathered the employees together and told then that he could get 10 workers in China for one of them, and that he wanted the machines packed up and sent to China by September. My last contact was seeing on the street a Neill tools employee who was waiting for a contract to go to China to teach the Chinese workers his job before going on the dole.

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I served my apprenticeship at Neill tools on Ecclesall road. There over 1200 personnel there until they moved.

Later (much later) in life I part owned a company who purchased their tools and had cause to visit them at Atlas where they are based now. I was taken through the warehouse and I asked where all the maintainence team were thinking I may see some old work mates. There were none as it was and is just a warehouse now. What a shame.

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