MP ENGINEERING

FROM THE GROUND UP

MP Engineering was founded in 1981 by Mick Poole as a small tooling business located in Wigston, Leicestershire.  The business focus in the early days was to deliver quality products in a short lead-time, this philosophy around agility, fast make and the core skills associated with this remain in place today.

In this first unit, Mick and his right hand man Derek used to pick up scrap parts of  machines discarded by bigger companies and build them up back to full working order. Without Derek’s help, MP Engineering wouldn’t have survived in those early days as well as it did.

From the first rendition of MP Engineering in Wigston, we moved to Barwell then made it to Brindley Road in Hinckley. At this time there was only Mick, Nikki, Jason and a couple of engineers working at MP. Two of our main customers went bust a short while into our new factory leaving us well and truly down and out for the count. One of these customers offered us a CNC lathe as a token payment which we accepted. This was our first CNC, a YAMAZAKI Dyna-Turn 3L CNC Lathe.

Once we got the CNC, the next problem was learning how to program it. There wasn’t CAM software and post processors to help back then, this was just long hand old school programming. Jason, our now production director, quickly got his head round this new technology and we were soon up and running, now with a CNC at our disposal. With this new technology we could now take more work on and produce larger scale batches quicker than ever before. Seeing the benefits MP was gaining from this it wouldn’t be long before we got our first CNC milling machine. A Bridgeport VMC 1000. Which was a completely different way of programming to the lathe, so Jason again had to learn this new way going on CNC milling courses to get to grips with the back then ‘new’ Heidenhain control. On this course Jason met Mick Simpson and quickly offered him a job. This was the start of our CNC journey.

Since those early days’ MP Engineering have grown significantly, we moved from Brindley Road to Jacknell Road and finally to Maizefield, currently employing 40 people in a state of the art 16,000 square foot manufacturing facility based in Hinckley in the heart of the midlands and remain a privately-owned business still managed by the Poole family.

The business has evolved from a tooling business in to the manufacture of high precision formula 1 components for several of the leading teams, where much of our cutting-edge technology and innovation has been developed and honed.

In recent years and through our ability to create innovative ways of manufacturing parts, this has helped open new opportunities in the Aerospace supply chain, which is an area we are very excited about and something we are optimistic can grow in the coming years.

As a business we are continually striving to improve taking great pride in our apprenticeship scheme, the quality of the engineers we are developing, and the high employee retention rate of our dedicated and skilled staff.

We remain a very customer focused business, continually investing in new machine tools with approved planning permission to extend the facility, which we envisage will be required in the next few years in line with our strategy to grow our aerospace along side our formula one business.