TPi March 2019

Business & market news

Celebrating 75 years of precision stainless steel tube manufacture in the UK

delivered the corrosion-resistant heat exchanger tubes for Spain’s ground- breaking Gemasolar power plant, which is capable of absorbing 95 per cent of radiation in the solar spectrum and transmitting this energy from the Sun for storage in a molten salt compound in the plant’s interior. It was also contracted to supply the specialist titanium tubing for the chemical propulsion system aboard the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, which will fly to within 45 million kilometres of the Sun, enduring powerful bursts of atomic particles from explosions in the solar atmosphere, to capture images of the solar poles for the first time and help to explain how the Sun generates magnetic fields. “Fine Tubes can look back on a truly impressive history of technological achievement on an international stage,” commented Dave Cawse, operations director for Fine Tubes. “With so much of that achievement generated from our facility in Plymouth, Fine Tubes can claim to be a significant player in the story of UK manufacturing success. I look forward to the next 75 years!” Fine Tubes – UK sales.finetubes@ametek.com www.finetubes.com

Since 2016, Fine Tubes has been part of the Specialty Metal Products division of Ametek Inc, a global manu- facturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices. In medicine and health care, having already developed profiled implant tubing for medical applications 18 years ago, Fine Tubes began manufacturing advanced titanium tubing for femur and tibia bone nail implants in 2004. For the nuclear power industry, the company began developing specialised tubes for the UK’s first generation of gas-cooled reactors in the 1970s. As nuclear power evolved, so did the company’s expertise. Its products are now found in AGR, pressurised water, light water, heavy water and fast breeder reactor plants across Europe, the USA, Canada, India and China. From the technological advances that came with early subsea drilling in the North Sea in the 1970s, up to the present deep-water challenges, Fine Tubes helps the offshore oil and gas industry with the high-pressure tubing required to extract subsea oil and gas from some of the most hostile downhole conditions. Fine Tubes was chosen to supply 130 km of cooling tubes for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; and in 2013, the company

Fine Tubes, a UK-based manufacturer of high-precision, high-performance tubing products, recently celebrated its 75 th anniversary. The company supplies a wide range of advanced stainless steel, nickel alloy and titanium tubes for critical applications in the aerospace, medical, oil and gas, and energy industries. Founded in Surbiton in 1943, Fine Tubes began construction of a 51,000 ft 2 production facility in Plymouth in 1960, and moved into its new factory in 1962. The company has been a major local employer ever since and can look back on several key milestones. Its early success in the aerospace market began in 1957, when it started to supply tubing for the Vickers Viscount aircraft. Eight years later, the company was manufacturing advanced stainless steel alloy tubes for Concorde, the world’s first supersonic airliner. By 1999, the company was manu- facturing titanium tubing for the hydraulic systems aboard the Eurofighter. Today, Fine Tubes is one of the few suppliers qualified to produce the high-pressure titanium tubes used in the hydraulic systems of the Airbus A380 and A350, and recently won an extension of its contract to supply the full range of Airbus aircraft.

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March 2019 TUBE PRODUCTS INTERNATIONAL