Mark Schlotel, marketing director at Victorian Sliders, reveals how the company achieves best quality and lowest cost production, time after time.“ Victorian Sliders is Europe’ s largest specialist manufacturer of PVCu vertical sliding sash windows, extruding and fabricating made to measure ECOSlide windows in a purpose-built 100,000 square foot production facility based in Carmarthenshire, South Wales. We are proud to be manufacturing in Wales and have never received any grant aid or government funding support. Building works have been taking place at the Capel Hendre headquarters to double the size of our ECOSlide production facility to 230,000 square feet. Every aspect of product design and fabrication is carried out in house by our team under strict quality control procedures, from the specification of specially formulated raw materials, to the extrusion of highly engineered PVCu window profiles, woodgrain foil or colour spray surface finishing of the window frame components, toughened, sealed double glass unit production and final assembly of complete CE Marked sash windows.

Using our own fleet of transport vehicles, we distribute finished windows to regional depots in readiness for local delivery to professional trade installers, who in turn supply and fit ECOSlide windows for their retail customers. Our mission is to fully process every sash window order within five working days, from placement of order to delivery completion. Under the leadership of business owner and chief executive, Scot Starkey, we are continually investing to improve production accuracy, speed and efficiency, using robotics where possible to minimise handling in our factory environment with 120 skilled and experienced staff championing product quality to create sash windows that are second to none.

PVCU PROFILE EXTRUSION We have been extruding our own purpose-designed profiles from a 100 % virgin, lead-free compound since 2009, so to be totally accurate we are in fact a specialist sash window system‘ designer-extruder-fabricator’. Four new high-speed extrusion lines and 18 new extruded profile tools were added in 2015, so we now have seven PVCu extrusion lines in operation at Capel Hendre to meet demand.

PRECISION FABRICATION We use Schirmer cutting and machining centres and Urban quad-welding and corner cleaning lines to ensure high precision fabrication. Our purpose-built plant has capacity for production of 6,500 sash windows per week, which will increase when the current building works are completed.

PROFILE BENDING We have a dedicated production area with profile bending equipment, which caters for special fabrication of architectural True Arch, Gothic Arch and Swept Head sash windows, exactly to specification.

FOIL & SPRAYED FINISHING Woodgrain foil finishing or bespoke sprayed colour finishing of ECOSlide PVCu sash window profiles is undertaken at the Capel Hendre site, under our own quality control. The aim is to provide customer choice, so we offer four popular two‘ inside and out’ foil finishes( crystal white, cream, golden oak and Irish oak) and seven‘ dual colour’ foil finishes featuring an external colour and internal solid white PVCu. Beyond that selection, our onsite paint shop enables ECOSlide windows to be optionally spray painted to match virtually any RAL code or colour for a truly personalised product solution.

IGU MANUFACTURING All our insulated glass units are manufactured in-house and ECOSlide vertical sliding windows feature toughened glass in both top and bottom sashes. A-rated WER is the standard product offering and Argon gas-filling of sealed IGUs is an optional specification, depending on the WER required.

PACKAGING & DESPATCH Complete CE Marked glazed window units are carefully packaged, ready for despatch by Victorian Sliders lorry to our regional logistics distribution depots or customer delivery addresses. Bay windows are fully assembled in the factory to check every dimensional detail, prior to bubble wrapping and loading onto our delivery vehicles. An extensive network of professional trade installers regularly buys ECOSlide windows and these retailing companies provide surveying, quotation, sash window supply and installation services on behalf of UK homeowners. Our strategy is simple – we are totally focussed on one product category: vertical sliding windows. We extrude, fabricate and deliver but do not install, so we never compete with our professional trade installer customers.”

www. victoriansliders. co. uk