The third and newest Glaston FC500 furnace is starting to roll out glass at specialist toughened glass manufacturer, TuffX.
Describing the activity as ‘perfect timing’, John Tierney, operating director at TuffX, said: “The market is back with a vengeance. Demand for high-performance glass used in UK conservatories is starting to outpace supply. And we don’t want to turn away any more business.”
Joining two previous Glaston tempering lines, purchased in 2007 and 2010, Glaston’s FC500 was installed in February 2016, giving TuffX Glass the capacity needed to serve the growing market demand.
John said: “We chose our first Glaston tempering furnace nearly 10 years ago because of the reputation of the company. Glaston (and at the time Tamglass) is one of the best names in the industry. It’s not a cheap investment – but the Glaston engineers are really good at what they do when designing a tempering line. You just switch it on – and it works!”
Glaston’s service and support have also been highly appreciated. So TuffX Glass bought a second line and now is just beginning the production with their third furnace, the FC500.
“With both machines working 24 hours, six days a week, we realised that we had a bottleneck in our capacity,” continued John. “We simply couldn’t toughen any more and had to turn away business from the growing conservatory glass market. That’s when we called Steve Brammer at Glaston UK, [who recommended] the Glaston FC500 furnace.”
John got to see the furnace at the Glasstec Dusseldorf exhibition and again in Milan in 2015. “We could see exactly what we wanted,” he said. “The market has been developing very rapidly in the UK for soft-coated glass that requires state-of-the-art tempering machinery and Glaston provides high-performance glass made easy.
“Glaston’s guys and the knowledge they have are exceptional. Of course, there are going to be problems, but they make it simple – and user friendly. With Glaston’s machinery, we’ve never experienced any significant amount of downtime.”
