SPECIALIST MAKER

Do you have the flexibility, practicality and ability to make (almost) anything?  That’s what we’re looking for…

Overview

Davies and Begbie are building a great creative team to deliver design and manufacturing services through our “Makersmith” brand and our own products through the “Two Green Leaves” brand.

We are small but have great visions that inspire us and want you to be inspired and share those visions too:

Our vision for Makersmith is:

“To be the UK’s most satisfying company; to be a place for businesses to come to create whatever they can’t buy off the shelf.”

And our vision for Two Green Leaves is:

“To enable people to create and enjoy their own sustainable environment”

We are driven by creativity, practicality and an enthusiasm for great design and our focus is on developing a profitable, inspiring and enjoyable business.

The role

As a Specialist Maker you will need to be really flexible. We are a small business but your role is crucial as you help make product and contribute to the product development process.

We want people who can take boring repetitive production work and think of ways of making it interesting and more efficient. We need people who can take a design for something they have never made before and make an excellent finished product. Above all we need people who are interested in what we do and are committed to excellence.

Responsibilities

• Manufacture one-off and batch quantities of product in a range of materials including metals, timber, plastics and glass using a range of tools and equipment including manual hand tools, portable and bench mounted power tools and CNC equipment.
• Work on client sites when necessary to carry out surveys and to install product.
• Source and purchase materials and equipment to set budget & timescale
• Maintain production equipment and buildings.
• Set up and comply with Health and Safety systems and procedures

Requirements

Who you are is as important as what you can do; as a minimum we are looking for someone with these essential Hard Skills:

• Minimum of 12 months experience in a hands-on manufacturing environment
• Ability to read engineering and construction drawings
• A minimum of a current car driving licence with no endorsements.
• Able to use Microsoft Office products: Excel, Word, Outlook (Email) & PowerPoint
• Able to use the internet.
• Clear written communication with correct grammar & spelling. Ability to structure technical reports clearly and logically.

These desirable hard skills:

• Experience of 3D printing
• Metal fabrication experience
• Experience of model making
• Product painting and finishing

And these essential Soft Skills:

• Creative thinker – constantly seeking to improve and add value to specific products, processes and to the business as a whole. 
• Able to engage confidently in internal team meetings and activities with clear and persuasive written and verbal communications.
• Able to engage with clients and suppliers through effective listening and good verbal and interpersonal skills.
• Demonstrable positive engagement and contribution to product manufacturing and business development in previous job roles.
• Attention to detail: able to efficiently deliver high quality products.
• Awareness of the important relationship between manufacturing time, quality and cost demonstrable through previous manufacturing experience.
• Capable of approaching tasks with a questioning attitude, making no assumptions about task requirements and available information.
• Adaptable and willing to carry out a wide range of tasks in a flexible job role that is responsive to client and market needs.
• A personal interest in making and great design.

Location

We have a great rural location in Wykeham, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park and 6 miles from the sea – surfing, mountain biking and 1500km2 of National Park on your doorstep…

Hours and Benefits

We are open to the following employment options depending on experience and personal preference:

1. Part time employment for 2 days per week at 7.5 hours per day
2. Part time employment for 3 days per week at 7.5 hours per day
3. Full time employment for 5 days per week at 7.5 hours per day

For all options we are offering a monthly salary based on an hourly rate of £9.30/hr to £12.80/hr depending on experience.

Potential for personal and career development in a small but expanding company where you can be really involved.

Recruitment Process

Please call this number: 01723 336151

And leave a voicemail in response to the message you hear.

If we would like to hear from you further, we’ll call you and ask for you to send us your CV

If we want to meet you, we will arrange for an initial interview where you will also be asked to carry out a DISC behavioural profile assessment.

Finally, we will interview a short list of candidates, check your references and make an appointment.

CREATIVE DESIGN SPECIALIST

Do you have the creativity, practicality and the enthusiasm for great design that we’re looking for?

Overview

Davies and Begbie are building a great creative team to deliver design and manufacturing services through our “Makersmith” brand and our own products through the “Two Green Leaves” brand.

We are small but have great visions that inspire us and want you to be inspired too:

Our vision for Makersmith is:

“To be the UK’s most satisfying company; to be a place for businesses to come to create whatever they can’t buy off the shelf.”

And our vision for Two Green Leaves is:

“To enable people to create and enjoy their own sustainable environment”

We are driven by creativity, practicality and an enthusiasm for great design and our focus is on developing a profitable, inspiring and enjoyable business.

The role

As a Creative Design Specialist you will have responsibility for a range of activities, from meeting clients and developing concept designs to carrying out market research and hands-on manufacture.   We want people who can creatively engage with what we do and take an initial idea and deliver a finished product with all the detail work and communications involved in between.  We are stretching our business and you will be stretched too.

Responsibilities

• Deliver design services for our clients ranging from full product design to a simple single drawing
• Create new own-brand products from concept to production including prototyping and market roll-out.
• Liaise with clients, suppliers and sub-contractors to support project targets.
• Manage whole project life cycles from first contact to final delivery.
• Research and analyse target markets and successfully deliver services and products into those markets

Requirements

Who you are is as important as what you can do.  As a minimum we are looking for someone with these essential Hard Skills:

• Minimum educational level of HND or equivalent in Product Design, Mechanical Engineering or other similar physical product design subject.
• Minimum experience of 3 months product, building or engineering design using SolidWorks 3D CAD for creating of product assemblies, components and drawings
• Experience of design of products using a combination of materials including metals, timber, glass & plastics. Demonstrable through previous in-job design work or educational projects.
• Able to use Microsoft Office products: Excel, Word, Outlook (Email) & PowerPoint
• Able to use the internet.
• Clear written communication with correct grammar & spelling. Ability to structure technical reports clearly and logically.

And these essential Soft Skills:

• Creative thinker – constantly seeking to improve and add value to specific products, tasks and the business as a whole. 
• Able to engage confidently in internal team meetings and activities with clear and persuasive written and verbal communications.
• Able to engage with clients and suppliers through effective listening and good verbal and interpersonal skills.
• Demonstrable positive contribution to product value and business development in previous job roles.
• Attention to detail: able to resolve designs to full production detail, making no assumptions and leaving no loose ends.
• Awareness of the important relationship between time, quality and cost demonstrable through previous project work or research.
• Capable of approaching tasks with a questioning attitude, making no assumptions about task requirements and available information.
• Able to research ideas, markets and information thoroughly and apply an analytical approach to research results presenting findings clearly and cogently.
• Adaptable and willing to carry out a wide range of tasks in a flexible job role that is responsive to client and market needs.
• A personal interest in design and creativity.
• Willing to get involved in the full range of business processes including manufacturing, marketing & client interfaces as well as design.

Location

We have a great rural location in Wykeham, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park and 6 miles from the sea – surfing, mountain biking and 1500km² of National Park on your doorstep…

Benefits

• Annual salary £19k-£25k depending on experience
• Flexitime and part home-working options

Potential for personal and career development in a small but expanding company where you can get involved with the full product life cycle.

Recruitment Process

Please call this number: 01723 336153

And leave a voicemail in response to the message you hear.

If we would like to hear from you further, we’ll call you and ask for you to send us your CV

If we want to meet you, we will arrange for an initial interview where you will also be asked to carry out a DISC behavioural profile assessment.

Finally, we will interview a short list of candidates, check your references and make an appointment.

When we are approached by our clients with a new project we carefully review their requirements and pick the best materials for the job. We would love to be able to process everything in-house but we would need an immense range of equipment and an immense factory.  Instead, when we can’t process components in-house we focus on working with great suppliers who can deliver the high quality of components that we need.  We then finish and assemble them, together with the parts that we make to produce the excellent products that our clients are looking for.

Stainless steel parts are a really good example: we bring them in from a range of suppliers and finish and fabricate them ourselves.  We have given this a component a random satin finish before building it in to bespoke stainless steel structure.

This satin finish feels almost like a fabric and is an excellent non-directional finish for stainless steel.

At the other end of the scale we are working with some bespoke wicker products made to our design by a UK manufacturer from English willow. We aren’t re-finishing these but have other assembly work to do but it’s another example of the diversity of work that we do and the flexibility we can offer our clients.

 

 

We use our CNC router for all sorts of bespoke engraving and we were recently asked to produce some custom drawer front engravings for a local cabinet maker; we really liked the idea of these drawers and began thinking about what sorts of bread might be inside and what sorts of treats we would like to see in the TREATS drawer!

The trouble is that the Treats drawer is a bit too obvious – I can see some little hands creeping in…

With our engraving tooling we can achieve an excellent quality of engrave with sharp corners and great definition. You can see what that looks like from this close up of a sample piece of oak:

We can also laser cut and engrave anything from plastic to wood to leather so there’s lots we can do for you at home – or for your business.

See more about what we can do and get in touch…

 

So many things that we use these days are manufactured in large centralised factories, often thousands of miles away. I was impressed to read about the Tesla Gigafactory, being constructed to manufacture batteries at a cost of $5billion and covering 126 acres – pretty big…
What if we were to look at things slightly differently so that, when appropriate, we designed and made what we need locally, with local staff, skills and resources in human scale workshops? That might force us to question not only our need for certain products but also the materials that we use and the functionality of the products themselves.
Maybe if we took this route we might think of making more use of locally available materials such as timber and also re-using perfectly viable components from products that would otherwise be scrapped.
Think of a washing machine – there’s a lot of hardware going to the dump – the casing, the damping weight, the drum – why not rebuild with the old parts?
Making and re-making locally – something to think about…

We really enjoy the variety of work that we do, not just in the challenge of solving new design and manufacturing problems each day but also in the scale and range of the applications we have to deal with.

Yesterday was a good example, our workload included the design and manufacture setup for a bariatric toilet seat, a set of parts for a model paddle steamer as well as the creation of a formal Technical Document demonstrating product compliance with a European Standard. (Thankfully we are members of BSI, so that helps…)

So our work ranges in scale from full size house design to this – the smallest part yet, a bearing housing laser cut and engraved from Perspex:

 

So whatever the project – how big – or small (or unusual) we can help: http://www.makersmith.works/working-for-you.html

We’re really pleased to launch the Makersmith blog and to to have a great place to tell you more about what we are doing and thinking – and to give you lots of help too!

Things are pretty busy at the moment as we are gearing up to make a large batch of ornate cabinets that our client is going to use to house some interactive animatronics.  There’s going to be a lot of CNC machining, laser cutting and assembly going on as the design includes a range of hardware, timber mouldings, acrylics and glass.

To make sure the design is right we built it all first as a 3D computer model in SolidWorks then made a physical prototype and now head into production.  To find out more about what we can do, have a look at our website here…