After a £1.7 million investment, Jaguar Land Rover can now make body stamping tools and dies in-house at their Halewood, England factory.
After a £1.7 million investment, Jaguar Land Rover can now make body stamping tools and dies in-house at their Halewood, England factory.
These tools are massive metal items used in large presses to make the aluminum and steel panels that form a Land Rover vehicle. The advanced unibody structures of a modern Land Rover require precision stamping and the tools to make it must survive hundreds of thousands of presses over the years, with no room for error and without getting marred or damaged.
The force exerted to stamp a body panel is so high that the stamping building at the Solihull, England factory is built on a dampened concrete block, which prevents the vibrations from pressing operations from traveling through the area. Otherwise, the force of creating panels would crack the runway at Birmingham International Airport, a mile away from the iconic Lode Lane factory!
These tools have been made in Asia for many years. But with the coming updates to Land Rover’s lineup and the massive supply chain and shipping issues caused by the pandemic, it seems that Land Rover felt driven to move the production to Britain. The new Press Die Manufacturing Centre at the Halewood factory, near Liverpool, will allow these precision items to be made in the UK while training a new workforce of skilled workers in Britain. A five-axis milling machine will make the high-quality tools.
The new facility will produce tools and dies for all of Land Rover’s factories worldwide – not just for the vehicles built at Halewood.
Tool Room Apprentice Hannah Cocklin is one of the first to gain experience from the new facility. She said, “This investment has given the tooling workforce a real boost as we are doing things we didn’t think we would ever get to do at Halewood. This is the last year of my apprenticeship so it’s brilliant to see what the future has in store for the team. It’s also exciting for the new apprentices joining the company this month. They probably never expected to be making the tools themselves.”
Though Land Rover’s media says this is the first time that tool and die manufacturing has been done in-house, the muddy history of Land Rover management raises the question of how far back that goes. Unknown is whether early Series stamping tools were made in-house in the 1940s and 1950s. Regardless, it’s been a very long time since it was a British-based part of the manufacturing process.
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