Gmu Girling shuts and moves
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• Grau Girling, the Echlin subsidiary which manufactures Skidchek truck and trailer antilock braking systems, is to close its Tredegar factory and move into a new site at Redditch, Worcestershire. Gran Girling plans to occupy the Redditch factory, which is being acquired from Quinton Hazell. in May. From then on all the firm's anti-lock development and production will be concentrated on one site.
Currently the Skidchek electronic control modules are manufactured at an old Lucas Girling plant at Tisely, Birmingham while the Tredegar plant makes the anti-lock air valves, as well as air reservoirs and other simple air brake actuation components.
Jeff Pratt, Grau Girling's general manager, says that production of these non-antilock "low technology components" will cease when the Tredegar plant is closed. There will be "some redundancies", he says, and the workforce at Redditch will total about 90. The anti-lock systems that will be made at Redditch are the established GX and MGX systems, for trucks and trailers respectively, and from later this year a new, digital, Category One, DGX system will be made. Calor Gas, one of the first operators to specify Lucas Girling Skidchek (as it was then) for its tractive units in the 1970s, has now begun to specify the GX system for all its new 16-tonne rigids. The first to enter the Calor fleet will be 24 ERF M16s which are fitted with LPG tanks.