Gold table centrepiece, sold to the Far East in the 1980s. The huge emerald, finely carved, was nearly fist sized, the 3D engine turned base of the piece being about 6 inches from left to right in this image.
In the 21st Century, Pledge & Aldworth Engine Turners are well known amongst the gold and silver trades for reviving the engine turning process by applying a fresh and imaginative approach to an ancient craft. David Pledge redefined engine turning as the new design medium for metal surfaces, translating it to all types of three dimensional surface, even complex shapes such as the famous 18ct gold telephones for the Sultan of Brunei.
The story begins in June 1977, when David Pledge, still a student of 21, studying at the Sir John Cass School of Art, approached the proprietors of J Fountain and son, Engine Turners, of St Cross St, Hatton Garden, London with a request for a temporary job so that he could learn about the craft of engine turning. Arrangements were made for him to work for a few months, taught by Mr Len Tidy, who was due to retire in September the same year. David worked for Fountains until Christmas 1977, when they closed for business.
David Pledge acquired some of the machinery from Fountains and in the summer of 1978, Pledge & Aldworth was founded, with Jane Aldworth as a partner. Work began in a small garage workshop in South East England and in 1980 the partners married and moved the business to premises in the Hatton Garden / Clerkenwell area of London.
During the 1980s Pledge & Aldworth redefined the engine turning process as a design medium rather than just a decorative process and achieved standards of quality on top class 3D work unmatched elsewhere. The firm quickly became an essential part of the high class London Objets d'Art market, where some of the finest examples of the art and craft of the goldsmith were produced in the final two decades of the twentieth century, many of the most important passing through our workshops, including the largest gold egg ever made; the Kutchinsky Egg. Our business went from strength to strength throughout the eighties and nineties as we supplied goods that ended up in nearly every royal palace on earth as well as the fine houses of the wealthy.
Gold table centrepiece, sold to the Far East in the 1980s. The huge emerald, finely carved, was nearly fist sized, the 3D engine turned base of the piece being about 6 inches from left to right in this image.
By the mid 1980s several other firms of engine turners had been acquired, including W T Whitlock and also Brown and Co in Birmingham, which in 1983 formed the Birmingham Branch, run under the Pledge & Aldworth name until it was closed in 2002 in a reorganization of the business, partly to take account of economic and market changes, but finally prompted by a serious fraud committed against the partners by the manager of the Birmingham branch who was conspiring with certain customers to divert payments for work direct to himself.
By the end of the eighties, we were becoming aware of the problems within the UK gold and silver trade caused by competition from Far Eastern countries where labour costs were just 1/200th the rate in the UK. With no support from government, the UK industry rapidly collapsed as importers were able to wholesale their products, fully packaged, at less than the price UK manufacturers were having to pay just for the raw materials! Although initially the objet market was resilient because the foreign competitors, although working at high quality, do not have the top level objet making craft skills, scandals surrounding one particular royal family, who had acquired significant parts of the London industry and then mismanaged it, caused the collapse even of Objet production. We saw hundreds of our high class customers go broke or close, one after the other, like a pack of cards as the millennium passed. Fortunately having seen the future, we had been busy working to solve the problem by developing our CAD CAM system, though this eventually became too much of a mainstay of our business for safety.
No 4b Straight Line Low Relief Engine Turning Machine from a 1925 Güdel Brochure, very similar to the one by the same maker that we have, which is used for one-off and small run low relief items.
In 1992 we were approached by an unknown Italian pen company with a request to produce a pen with a pattern that resembled hand engraving. We produced a low relief sample using a hand operated machine dating from the mid 1920s which we had acquired from the Kigu Compact company 12 years earlier. They responded to the sample by ordering 1,912 pens! Unfortunately - or fortunately as it turned out - this would have been completely uneconomical on the original hand operated machine. So we responded by suggesting that we purchase new CNC machinery from Switzerland, from the makers of the 1920s original.
The Swiss suppliers responded by informing us that such a machine was not possible and they were not planning to produce one. With a customer asking for an ongoing and apparently very fruitful business relationship, we decided to take a risk and develop our own system. This was more of a leap of faith than may be easily apparent as we had never tackled a project of this complexity before.
Incredibly, the first system was designed and built in only 6 months due to our unique use of 3D CAD. "With absolutely no experience of using a computer to create technical drawings, it never occurred to me that everyone else started their drawings in 2D and laboriously converted them to 3D at a later stage for modelling purposes. When I took my CAD system out of it's box, what I saw was a 3D module and a 2D module. The 2D module had all sorts of fancy bells and whistles for putting dimensions on a drawing, but the 3D module was straight forward and allowed me to draw directly in 3D. So I did! I just created the whole machine as a virtual object in cyberspace! If something got in the way of something else, I just stretched the objects until they fitted and did their job. I could rotate drawings and individual components and view them from all angles, it just seemed to be a very simple and natural way to design! I believe the rest of the World has by now largely caught up with my way of working, but it amazes me to find proprietary CAD systems that still work in the old 2D to 3D fashion!"
Software development took a few months longer but was still remarkably quick. If you wonder why such a small firm could develop a highly complex system which has not been copied after nearly a decade, take a look at how the Russians developed the Closed Cycle Rocket Engine in the 1960s (giving a huge 25% increase in efficiency), which they now manufacture and sell to the West, who, in spite of loads of money didn't succeed in developing it and quit trying early on! The American Space Shuttle still uses open cycle rocket engines! The Russians worked by practical testing of their rockets and blew quite a few up, we work in 3D from the start. As far as we are concerned the only use for 2D CAD is for printing drawings for casual reference after the design is complete. Don't say we didn't tell you how to use CAD!
In 1996 Pledge & Aldworth went online on the World Wide Web. This enabled the development of the online Illustrated Engine Turning Reference™ and integral Catalogue of patterns - The best source of information on Engine Turning in existence!
A second generation CAD/CAM system is currently under development - Pledge & Aldworth have a substantial continuous R&D budget in order to keep the firm well ahead of the rest of the world in engine turning technology. It is now possible to scan in a photograph or other image and turn it directly into a low relief 3D surface on metal. Since 1992 our 3D Surface Generation capability has remained unique to Pledge & Aldworth.
In 2000 we were asked by a well known ceramics manufacturer to work on a CAD CAM machining centre. In looking at their factory, we identified a need for a printer that could print ceramic glazes as ink onto 3D surfaces such as cups and jugs. Although that company ran short of R&D funding and cancelled both projects, we decided to work on robotics as a separate consultancy business.
At about this time, our success with CAD CAM engine turning suddenly began to work against us. The "little known" Italian company we had begun working with in 1992 had rapidly grown into an international luxury pen brand, and the owners, in response to a very good offer, sold it to a large international luxury goods group. Working with the new management proved less easy for a while and less work came our way from there after the take-over, but relations recovered and our unique skills are gaining in popularity with high class luxury goods producers around the world.
The penny Black Stamp: an early example of the use of Engine Turning for security printing.
In 2002 the major long term decline in the UK manufacturing gold and silver industry, combined with the fraud, prompted Pledge & Aldworth to amalgamate the two engine turning workshops into one larger premises. We were also working hard to gain new CAD CAM customers and we have had sufficient success to ensure the future of the business, albeit in a smaller form than when the Objet market was at its height. We are now concentrating on very high quality horological components, such as watch and clock dials as a new core business. Already we have begun to raise standards and the work continues to push the boundaries of the engine turning process. We are also taking on customers outside the traditional gold and silver industries, such as bespoke furniture makers, architects, and shipwrights and manufacturers and fitters of luxury private jets. We have even ventured back into the security printing industry, which began so very long ago with the engine turned design on the Penny Black Stamp!