Taylor's Engineering services ltd

It's going to be a scorcher over the next couple of days.
You either love it or you hate it and working outside there's definitely no hiding from it.

Either way, make the most of it because this is England and you know as well as I do it won't last. Next week we'll probably all be back in waterproofs wondering where the summer went.

Stay cool out there. ☀️

While 281 construction firms collapsed last month, a 250-year-old British steel company just started putting up the UK's largest forge. Some really positive news for the industry.

Sheffield Forgemasters has been making steel since 1776. Two and a half centuries on the same site in Sheffield, through wars, recessions and every rough patch this country has seen.

This month they have started putting up the UK's largest forging facility. A building that will stand 45 metres tall, built to produce the kind of large-scale steel components that Britain's defence and nuclear programmes can't get from anywhere else.

There's £1.3 billion invested, funded by the Ministry of Defence, and its already taking shape.

While the rest of this week's headlines are full of firms going under (and there are plenty of them) there's a 250-year-old British steel company quietly building something bigger than anything this country has seen before.
People in this industry should know all about it.

It's not a quick fix for everything that's wrong right now. The pressure on margins, the late payments, the firms folding, that's all still very real.

Sometimes though, it's worth looking at what's actually going up, not just what's coming down.

British steel. Still here. Still building.

What projects or investments are giving you confidence in the industry right now?

This week the team has been installing balustrade panels to precast balcony units ready for delivery to site.

Getting this done off site means the units arrive ready for install.

No waiting around, no risk of working at height on leading edges and the HAVS are minimised due to the studs being precast into the slabs.

Nice straightforward job to see the boys into the weekend.

Not every job is a 10-tonne beam.

This one was a bit different for us.

This nice aluminium cat ladder was dropped into a tight space with next to no working room. The lightweight materials made all the difference.

The weight made a genuine impact as the manual handling was minimised. No crane, no heavy lifting plan. Just a manageable install in a space that didn't give you much to work with.

This is the kind of job that reminds you that if you can read a site and adapt, the material almost doesn't matter.

Does your steel contractor utilise different materials on their jobs?