Young Farmers' Club visits Fuel Proof®

Last month we invited the fifty-strong Vale O’ Lune Young Farmers' Club on a guided tour of the Fuel Proof design and manufacturing facility, demonstrating the full range of production processes involved in turning sheet steel and laser-cut components into our market-leading fuel tanks and bowsers.

Welcoming the happy crowd of Young Farmers on site one warm September evening, we began the factory tour with a live demonstration of our incredible Cyber-Weld robotic welding arms, used by our manufacturing department on a daily basis to automate certain stages in our Fuelcube fuel tank production.

As Fuel Proof MD Andrew Hargreaves explained to our young visitors, with so much demand for our bestselling stackable fuel tanks, we simply wouldn’t keep up with our customers’ bulk orders without the use of this advanced welding automation tech. Our factory’s robot welding arms operate alongside our most experienced welders, bringing the best of both worlds to our fuel tank production process.

Once our Cyber-Weld robots have handled the more basic and time-consuming welds along our tanks’ main joins, our expert human team then take over to bring each tank to completion – and run through a series of checks to guarantee exceptional quality and compliance on every Fuelcube tank we sign off.

​Next up on their tour, the Young Farmers were shown through our facility’s vast main factory floor. It’s here that our CNC plate roller, floor-mounted rails and multiple overhead cranes which make up our automated boom welding system enable our army of welders to turn flat sheet steel into 110% bunded, best-in-class fuel storage equipment for our thousands of customers, both nationally and across the globe.

​The Young Farmers’ tour continued into our adjoining Fabrication and pipe bending workshop, showing our visitors the two giant Bystronic press brakes and laser cutting hardware which produce our fuel tanks’ precision parts, fittings and fuel lines – all of which are designed in-house for optimal performance, and for industry-specific fuel storage compliance.

Next up, Andrew showed the tour party through our industry-leading shot blast and paint facility, where our fabricated bare steel tanks are given their precision key surfaces, and each prepared for a super-tough two-pack polyurethane paint coating, carried out in our two specially designed spray booth ovens.

​Taking our crowd of visitors outdoors, on past our extensive storage yard and the coated fuel tanks awaiting their final fittings, the tour culminated in our warehouse and dedicated Assembly area for a Q&A session between Andrew and the Young Farmers, who were keen to know more about the business and its operations as a whole.

With the site tour drawing to a close, our local Young Farmers concluded their visit with some very important takeaways. For the Club’s older members, whose thoughts were leaning toward running their own successful businesses: a far broader understanding of what it takes to succeed as a large-scale, industry-leading company in today’s British manufacturing sector. As for the Club’s younger members, they took away something even more valuable… the much-coveted Fuel Proof gift bag and cap! 👍
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Our thanks to all members and organisers of the Vale O’ Lune Young Farmers – it was our absolute pleasure to have you on-site, and wishing you all the very best for the future, from all of us at Fuel Proof!