Geti Titanium is currently run by my brother Alan, with the original company, Greenfield Engineering Co., formed in 1965 by my father and operated from a rundown building in Greenfield Road, Harborne in Birmingham UK, manufacturing repetition turned parts in the form of specialist fasteners .

This is his story......

The building, which was a 100 year old converted house, was on two floors with the machinery installed on the top floor and I remember our next door adjoining neighbour, a completely deaf little old lady, would complain constantly about the ‘noise’. Although in reality what she could actually feel was the vibration through the walls and floorboards from the machinery.

The machinery was very old, pre WW2, and was operated by a team of 10 part time women who used to stand operating these machines for 5 hours at a time. Even I as a young lad had to work on these machines and, if you’ve ever had to do it, you soon come up with a plan for improving methods. My plan , for a start, was getting out of that ‘Hell hole’ and start investing in the more modern Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) lathes that were appearing on the scene – an absolute Godsend I assure you, although convincing my father was to turn into quite a battle.

The company relocated to Hockley, Birmingham UK around 1991 and, after a 6 month brainwashing and badgering session on my father, we bought our first CNC lathe. It was a second hand machine, practically unused, and bought at a snip for £15,000. I loved it! Looking back now though, compared to the machines we have at present, it was rubbish, but it gave me the confidence to buy other machines when I realised the potential for them.

Over the next 5 years, another 4 machines joined the portfolio and the team of women operators were gone, no longer needed by the automated operation that we had become. A staff of one lathe programmer, 2 machine bar loaders and yours truly could do 4 times as much as the 10 women lathe operators, and so we plodded merrily on until 1998 when, after a chance meeting with a jeweller who worked in The Birmingham Jewellery Quarter, I was asked if I could make a Titanium ring for him.

Now the word ‘Titanium’ strikes fear in many a hardened engineer's heart as being an extremely difficult material to work with. But I thought ‘What the heck – we’ll give it a go.’ After building up a small range of designs and still not really seeing the potential of Titanium rings, I had my first website built and was amazed to receive an email from a chap in America asking if we could produce blanks for his jewellery manufacturing company over there, not realising that his company was one of the top 40 jewellery manufacturers in the USA. At the peak of this period we were making 500 blanks per month for this company and his brand was the 3rd most popular in the US.

I began to feel uneasy about relying on one customer so heavily for our business, our engineering work was becoming less and less interesting to me and so I proceeded to start building up a UK customer base amongst the many independent jewellery retailers we have over here – just in case.

Sure enough, this happy period came to an end. Far East manufacturing prices became a magnet for him and we were subsequently dropped like a stone. Fortunately, we had built up a customer base that was able to support us and although it was a big loss to us turnover wise, we were still able to continue.

Engineering work became less and less appealing to me – rings were in my blood now and so our engineering roots were severed in December 2004 when we relocated again into the heart of The Birmingham Jewellery Quarter to concentrate fully on the Titanium and Black Zirconium ring designs.

After more investment in laser welding and laser engraving machines and a brand new CNC lathe with milling tool attachments we arrive at the present day, thankful to a trade that has given us a whole new lease of life – long may it continue.