The Return of Nail Making

Dennis Somerville was an entrepreneur, he purchased several smaller companies and built them up. One of these, the Birmingham Nail Company, was purchased in 1986. 


Dawn Sambrooks hand-feeding a nail machine.

 At the time there was a reduction in the demand for tacks and this purchase enabled the factory to keep going. Production was moved to Commercial Road and modern presses were used to produce the nails, which were traditionally made on nail machines. This was the first time that nails had been made in this way and some customers would not buy them because they didn’t consider them to be cut nails. In reality they were a better, more consistent and cleaner product than the traditional variety. Many of the traditional manufacturers soon began to distribute Crown Nail’s products in preference to their own.
In the beginning there were 5 presses, all of which were hand-fed. Initially there were problems with reliability. The presses would only run for about an hour in between breakdowns, mainly due to the poor quality of the tools.

Garry Kruczek, the Deputy Works Manager was given the job of sorting things out. He was in charge of the fitting shop and was responsible for all of the maintenance of the machinery.

Garry joined the company as an apprentice in 1971 and his wife worked there for a while as a feeder on one of the presses. 


Hand-feeding one of the larger machines.

Julie Thompson operating an automatically fed nail machine with bowl feed.		 Garry spent most of his time in the fitting shop and when he started he worked with Bob Hawks, Johnny Winfield and Geoffrey Weager, who occasionally came in from the tack shop to give a helping hand. 

After 18 months Bob passed away and Johnny left, and so for several years Garry ran the fitting shop alone. In 1978 he was joined by Shaun Thompson, a good engineer and machinist.

To overcome the problems with the presses, new tooling was developed with the assistance of Richard Kent, from Kent Engineering and made in-house.
In order to reduce costs and labour it was decided to produce automatic feeds for the machines. Garry rose to the challenge and designed and built a very successful pneumatically operated automatic feeding system, which remained in use until production ended. Very clever bowl feeds were also developed with the help of Tribal Automation. They oriented the blanks in the right direction to be loaded into the magazine that fed the press.
The nails were cut from a steel strip in the same manner as the tacks and were made to ISO 9002 and BS 1202 part 1. High quality steel was used and the company was justifiably proud of its products. Different finishes were available for the nails. They could be chemically blacked, galvanised, or brass plated and were also available in a painted finish. 


One of the clever bowl feeds in operation.

Many types of nails were produced, including cut floor brads and cut clasp nails. Cut nails have more holding power than traditional wire nails and are used in floorboards, breezeblock and the renovation of old buildings. One of the company’s later products was rosehead nails for the building industry, which if needed could be coloured.

At the beginning about one ton of nails was produced each week and this eventually rose to about 15 tons a week. The nails varied in size from 25mm clasp nails to 150mm long nails for a Swedish customer. The nails were packed into 25 kilo cartons.
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