Who's this chap in Piccadilly Circus? Anyone? Cupid or Eros, do I hear you say? Well, apparently it isn't, after all. This statue is actually of ANT-eros, the God of Unrequited Love (doesn't sound so zippy on a postcard, does it?!) it was put up in 1893 as the Shaftesbury Memorial (after the Earl of Shaftesbury). The Earl himself was one of the great philanthropists of the Victorian age and spent his life doing his bit against poverty (which was in ample supply during this time).
What has this got to do with windows? Well, the statue of Anteros (thank you) is one of the first appearances of cast aluminium. There you are, then.
We get all our Aluminium or "Aly" from Smarts Architectural Aluminium in Yatton, North Somerset. Smarts run a pretty tight ship and have regular 'training days' for its business partners. Needless to say, as with all things nowadays, there is a computer program that tells you how to put Aluminium together. This piece of bespoke software is called 'V6'. Adrian and Andrew from Regent went to Smarts for a V6 training day and some free sandwiches (Adrian hasn't eaten this well in weeks). Andrew, having a short attention span, and being one of nature's nosey-parkers, wandered off into the staff-only area with his camera and managed to take a few photographs before he was apprehended by the Aluminium Police and led back to the V6 Training Suite to practice the ancient art of swearing at a computer.
Smarts Facts!
- All water used in cleaning before the pre-paint is harvested from the factory roof. Carbon-friendly box ticked!
- 30,000 sq/m facility just 30 minutes down the road from us. Another carbon-friendly box ticked!
- Made in the UK (cue flag waving, please)
- £6.5 million worth of unpainted stock held at any one time (anyone got a flat-bed truck and a flashlight I can borrow?)
- On the extrusion line the billets are heated up to 400 degrees Celsius (even warmer than a microwaved jam doughnut on the top of your mouth)
- When the billets are pushed through the dies, they are under a pressure of 2200 tons per square inch; which is almost as much pressure as our MD, Andrew gets from his wife to have another child........
Â
