The West Midlands tube forming company which helped to make the unique cauldron that housed the flame throughout the London 2012 Olympics has revealed rising sales.
Smethwick-based Techniswage – which produced stainless steel tubes to go in the Olympic centrepiece – has invested £100,000 in new equipment after recording a 30 per cent increase in revenue.
Until now has been unable to reveal the part it played in the Olympics, owing to stringent publicity rules enforced by the organising committee, but director Paul Fellows said the deal came out of the blue.
He said he was contacted in October 2011 by specialist scenery contractor, Stage One, based in York, and it wasn’t until the next year – during the opening ceremony – that he realised the part he would be playing in the international event.
He said: “All became clear when I was at a family music festival in the wilds of Dorset. Around midnight whilst watching the Olympic opening ceremony inside a marquee, the cauldron came together and Techniswage became part of a team that had created a centre piece which was now on the world stage.”
The company, which has 10 employees, moved to new 7,500 sq ft premises in Smethwick during its 13th year in business.
The £100,000 investment came on the back of new orders including production for GKN Driveline of new Maserati variant’s prop shafts.
However, the Olympic deal is likely to become the one it is best known for.
The Thomas Heatherwick-designed cauldron was a familiar sight during the event, and signalled the opening when 204 separate petals in 10 rings to come together to form one cauldron and a single flame.
Techniswage had been asked if they could create a number of tapered tubes, each 1.3 metres in length.
The tubes were produced using a process called rotary swaging where rotating forming dies impart successive blows to the tube at a rate of 3,000 blows a minute, slowly reducing the diameter down to the required size.
