Westwood Works 1903-2003

The Product Line

When making a visit to the local supermarket and being surrounded by a sea of attractively packaged food products, it is all too easy to forget that the vast majority is produced continuously on automatic machinery, often at a rate of tons per hour. To duplicate these products in the home kitchen would mean going through a series of steps suggested by a recipe and, despite how carefully the recipe is followed, the chances are that the end result will differ, however slightly, from the one made the previous week.

This cannot happen in an industrial production line - each and every product must be identical to that produced last week, last month, last year - the reputation and the income of the food producer depends on it. It is often the case that the product must comply with legal requirements which set down close tolerances on unit weight, size. etc..

Take a food plant as an example. It must be capable of working 24 hours a day, six days a week, without stopping for cleaning or clearing hold-ups - just imagine how the cake mixture or bread dough in your kitchen sticks to your fingers or to the mixing bowl - at an output rate measured in tons every hour. Ask any of the Outdoor Men what a ton an hour looks like should a problem occur on a plant during commissioning - the plant operator can be, literally, knee-deep in product in a very short time.

These are just some of the problems facing the process engineer and design engineer when converting an idea for a new product into the means for its manufacture. At any moment, in every country in the world and in many parts of the food, chemical, printing and foundry industries, machinery made at Westwood Works turned out those products which we all take for granted as part of every day life, to a level of quality that provided profits to its customers and value for money to end -consumers.

There follows a cross section of the range of machinery made at Westwood Works in the late seventies - early eighties, together with photographs of the end-products that each produced - and still does in most cases!