Labone Castleside Ltd

Here is one aspect of injection moulding that catches people out. A tool with eight cavities is, in practice, eight slightly different tools. They are cut to the same drawing, but steel is steel. Fill one, measure it, and you have learned about one cavity. You have learned nothing about the other seven. A dimension that sits comfortably in tolerance on a first-off can drift somewhere else entirely once that tool has been running for an hour or two. So we measure across every cavity, from different times throughout the sampling phase, before a tool is signed off for production. This ensures we are capable of repeating the process time and time again. And every part we make is traceable back to the material batch, the machine and the shift that made it. That is what IATF 16949 asks of a supplier into automotive. It is increasingly what a medical or aerospace buyer asks for too, which is rather the point. If someone has sent you a first-off report with a single part on it, it is worth asking which cavity that part came from. Injection moulding and assembly in Consett, County Durham. 60 years and counting. #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding #QualityManagement

Back in May I followed a new tool through this factory, from the day it landed to the first approved production parts. That tool behaved, and most do. What I didn't show you is the other version. A tool arrives, we put it in the press, and what comes off isn't what the drawing says. Short fill, visual imperfections, a dimension that drifts. The thing that decides how bad it gets is when you find out. At Labone Castleside, we inspect a tool before it goes anywhere near a press, then we trial it and measure across every cavity before anyone talks about production quantities. If there's a problem in that steel, I'd much rather we're the ones who find it, with the tool on our bench and no parts shipped. The alternative is finding it in a first delivery, which is the expensive way to learn the same thing. #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding

The question we heard most at Interplas wasn't about price. It was about lead times. Buyers from medical, automotive and energy kept asking a version of the same thing: can we get this moulded properly, in the UK, without waiting half a year for first parts. The answer is yes, and the reason is proximity. When the tool is forty miles away instead of four thousand, you can stand on the floor during the trial. You can change a process and see the result the same week, not the next quarter. When something needs fixing, it gets fixed before it ships, not after it lands in a container. That's the part the piece price never shows. Freight. The rejects you find too late. The stock you carry because the lead time forces you to. Cheap stops being cheap the moment a programme slips or a batch comes back wrong. We've been injection moulding in Consett, County Durham for over 60 years. 31 machines, around the clock. The capacity is here, and so is the quality system: IATF 16949, every part traceable, tolerances in microns. Automotive, medical, or industrial, the discipline doesn't change. More buyers are doing that maths now. If you're placing tooling for 2027 and beyond, the conversation is worth having closer to home. Injection moulding and assembly in Consett, County Durham. 60 years and counting. #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding #Reshoring

Most people don't move a moulding tool because things are going well. The conversations we have tend to start the same way. A supplier is retiring, or has been acquired, or has quietly stopped being reliable. Or the tool sits four thousand miles away and every problem takes a month to resolve. The part itself is fine. The arrangement around it is not. And still people wait, because moving a live programme feels riskier than putting up with a poor one. It is worth knowing what actually happens when a tool arrives here. We inspect it before anything else. Tools that have been running elsewhere for years turn up in all sorts of condition, and that, more than anything, decides how smoothly a transfer goes. Then we trial it, measure parts across every cavity and prove the process holds before anyone discusses production quantities. The documentation is rebuilt properly, traceable to material batch, machine and shift, the same as any programme we run under IATF 16949. The honest part: sometimes we open a tool up and find the reason your parts have been drifting. Sixty years in, it does not take us long to work out whether a tool is in good order or has been nursed along, and either way you will hear it from us early rather than six months into production. If you have a programme you are wary of moving, tell us what is on the tool and we will tell you what is realistic. Injection moulding and assembly in Consett, County Durham. 60 years and counting. #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding #Tooling

After sixty years of moulding in Consett, the most reliable information in this business has never come from a report. A good example, this week. The trade press has been saying resin prices are falling and it's a better market for buyers. So I asked the person who actually places our material orders whether we were seeing any of it. His answer was no. Prices have come off their spring peak, but we are nowhere near where we were before the conflict started, and he expected them to climb again before long. Within days he was proved right. Renewed trouble in the Gulf has pushed oil back up to over $100 per barrel, and that feeds into the polymers we buy soon enough. That is the real story, and it isn't "up" or "down". It is that this market can swing either way within a week. We plan for that, not for the best month we have had. None of this is anti-data. We run an IATF 16949 system, we measure everything, and evidence matters here more than most places. But a figure in a market report describes a market in general. It does not describe your supply chain, your grades, your volumes, or your week. It is the same on the floor. The setter who can hear a press about to give trouble before it shows in the numbers is doing something no dashboard does for us. It matters for customers too. A supplier repeating the market headline, rather than what their own buying desk is actually seeing, is giving you the story rather than the position. We would rather give you the awkward version, and right now the awkward version is that material prices have not settled, and we are not pretending they have. 60 years in, We've learned to trust the person holding the purchase order over the person writing the forecast. #UKManufacturing #Leadership #SupplyChain

Sustainability used to be the last question in a supplier audit. Now it's often the first. More of the specs landing on our desk have recycled content, carbon reporting or material traceability written into them. Not as a nice-to-have. As a condition of the quote. For a moulder, that changes the job. Recycled material doesn't behave like virgin. Flow, shrinkage and colour consistency all shift, and a part signed off on virgin resin will not automatically hold its tolerance at 30% recycled. It has to be re-proven on the press, with data to show it holds. That's the part most people underestimate. It isn't buying a different sack of pellets. It's re-validating a process and proving the part still does its job, shot after shot, at the tolerance the drawing asks for. One thing worth knowing if you put plastic packaging on the market: the Plastic Packaging Tax rules on what counts as recycled content are due to change from 2027, and a factory's own production scrap is expected to stop counting toward the 30% threshold. Plenty of manufacturers have been closing the loop on their own regrind and assuming that covers them. It won't. If sustainability has moved to the front of your spec, bring us the part and the target. We'll tell you straight what's achievable and what isn't, before you commit a tool. Injection moulding and assembly in Consett, County Durham. 60 years and counting. #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding #Sustainability

There's a worry we hear from people outside the industry: EV's have fewer parts, so the work must be drying up for suppliers. For moulders, that gets it backwards. JLR confirmed at its recent investor day that the electric shift is still on, with billions going into UK plants and Halewood moving to all-electric production. We supply automotive-grade mouldings into that world, and what we're seeing isn't less work. It's different work. An electric platform changes the parts list. Fewer hot, under-bonnet components. A lot more in the cabin, in battery housings, in the thermal management that keeps a pack at the right temperature. And all of it under pressure to be lighter, because every gram costs range. None of that lowers the bar. If anything it raises it. A battery-adjacent part has to hold its tolerance and its integrity for the life of the car. That is the same discipline we built supplying Nissan and JLR for years: IATF 16949, full traceability, tolerances in microns. There's one more shift. When a programme moves to just-in-time on an electric line, having the moulder forty miles away rather than four thousand stops being a nice-to-have. If you're sourcing for an electric platform and want that work done properly, in the UK, we should talk. Injection moulding and assembly in Consett, County Durham. 60 years and counting. #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding #Automotive

Most buyers come to us for one size of part. Then they realise we can do the rest. Labone Castleside has been injection moulding in Consett, County Durham for over 60 years. We run 31 machines from 50 to 1,080 tonnes, 24 hours a day across three shifts. That range matters more than it looks. A 50 tonne press and a 1,080 tonne press are different worlds. Small, high-cavitation precision parts at one end. Large structural mouldings at the other. Most moulders pick a lane. We don't. For a buyer, that means one supplier, one quality system, one set of paperwork, whether you're sourcing a connector housing or a panel longer than the bench it sits on. No splitting a programme across three factories and hoping the tolerances agree. It's all held to IATF 16949, the standard the automotive industry demands. Every part traceable, every process controlled, tolerances in microns. The same discipline whether the work is automotive, medical, or industrial. If your programme has parts that don't sit neatly under one roof, that's exactly the problem we're built for. Injection moulding and assembly in Consett, County Durham. 60 years and counting. #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding #PlasticInjectionMoulding

Interplas is done for another three years. Here's what we're taking home. The robots did their job. Rover, the robot dog, and Polly, the humanoid, pulled a steady crowd to Stand R97 for all three days. Both were built by Keith Salkeld, our Head of Quality, from parts we've moulded for OEM customers including Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover. A good reminder that automotive-grade plastic ends up in stranger places than a car. The jar competition was closer in spirit than in numbers. The polymer in the jar weighed 1,292g. Plenty of confident guesses from people who mould for a living, and the winner still came in over 600g short. Congratulations Rob Davies at Formerra, who got closest. But the real value was the conversations. We spoke to buyers from medical, automotive and energy who were all asking a version of the same question: can we get this moulded properly, in the UK, without the lead times. The answer is yes, and it was good to say so face to face. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and to the team who made the stand what it was. Sixty years of moulding, two robots, and a lot of coffee. See you in 2029. #Interplas #UKManufacturing #InjectionMoulding