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(1) By #
The
Harvest Pie was one of the last major new
products to be manufactured at Cadby Hall.
It was also produced at Glasgow. It
started life with the name Homemade Pie
but there were objections to this name as
it implied that it was home made. It was
an innovative process since it was made
without the incorporation of dough
trimmings. The team of people involved was
large. As many as I can now remember are
listed below. I'm sure there are others
that I have forgotten and hopefully we'll
add these as we go along.
I was
lucky enough to be on the team as Process
Engineer under Roy Ingledew and become
joint patent holder,with Roy, of the
process to produce the pie without
trimmings. This involved blocking out the
divided piece of dough to become a base
and another to become the lid, instead of
the usual method of sheeting the pastry,
and thereby having to remove trimmings.
The lid then had to be placed on the fruit
filled pie base and released at the right
moment and not fall off prematurely. The
design of this 50 feet long make-up
machine was still being finalized after
the oven and other equipment had completed
installation in 'Y' block.
The plant
was being manufactured by Baker Perkins at
their Peterborough factory and
consternation reigned when they informed
Lyons that they could not guarrentee that
the lidding process would work. Apparently
no one had told the Lyons upper management
that the process had not been fully
prooven yet.
In what
could have become my final task at Lyons I
rather rashly offered to build a
demonstration rig to prove that our
proposal would work if they'd give me
£5,000 to spend and three weeks to do
it in. They agreed and I didn't get much
sleep during those three weeks and woke up
one morning with drawing instruments on
the blanket. Thanks to some fine
cooporation from Tommy Edwards and his
Cadby Hall Machine Shop staff my rapidy
built rig was set up in 2nd, floor C block
and given a couple of intensive day-long
trials. These were sufficiently successful
to enabled Baker Parkins to reverse their
cautionary stance and manufacture of the
make-up machines got under way. Although
this may sound dramatic all the team were
working tirelessly to get the project into
production. The opposite was
unthinkable.
I also had
the task of commisioning the three make-up
machines at Cadby Hall and the two at
Glasgow.
As you may
see on the drawing in the Patent Spec.
below there are eight plattens on the sub
circuit taking the lid round to the pie
base below. This had originally been
designed with four plattens but on test
start-up it was found that the
acceleration loads were too great and the
intermittent gear box driving the
sub-circuit failed. By adding four more
plattens the loads were reduced because
the index length and speed was
less.
There were
a number of problems before the launch.
Bakery Director D.C. McKenzie called a
group of us in to attend a day long
meeting on Boxing Day 1967 - the day after
Christmas Day - an unheard of thing and
every problem area was discussed and
analysed .
The
following were members of the Harvest Pie
project team. Please help me with other
names.
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Bruce
Croxford...........................
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#
Duval
(part).................
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Bob
Cummings((part)...
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Roy
Ingledew
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Bernard
Stafford (part)
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John
Pike (part)
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Bill
Graham
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Gerrry
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Peter
Brooks
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Gerald
Diamond
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Tony
Brincat
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Hans
Revier
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#
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Les
Price
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L
- R Don
Winter, Les Price, Bill Holland,
Bill Graham, Alan Harris and
Gerry Lawrence
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L
- R Keith Tinkler, Len Pell,
# and Peter
Brooks
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©
#
2002
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