Tube Investments set up Tube Products in 1929 to exploit patents for making tubing by electric resistance welding for all branches of engineering and manufacturing. They specialised in tubular cycle and motor parts, flushpipes, tubes for transformers, fabricated and manipulated tubes.
(If you want more information on resistance welding, look here: http://www.amy.amada.co.jp/e/useful/popup/pop01.html)
By the mid-1950s they had set up Tube Products of India, to produce the Electric Resistant Welded and Cold Drawn welded steel tubes, initially to meet the manufacturing demands for TI Cycles. This company operated in close liaison with the Oldbury factory. Eighty percent of cycles in India used TRU-WEL Tubes (the trade name of these products) for their framework. In 1971, one in every five cycles in India came from TI Cycles; by the following year, their capacity was an astonishing 725,000 cycles.
One advertisement for the company in 1961 stated:
‘TUBE PRODUCTS MAKE HISTORY TOO. We were the first to perfect ERW tubing in Europe, first to perfect ERW boiler tubing in the UK; first to develop an ERW tube with resistance welded helical fin; and first to produce ERW tubes up to 51/d inches outside diameter. Today TRU-WEL ERW tubes are used in nuclear heat exchangers, boilers, transformers and other electrical equipment, motor cars and heavy transport, bicycle, furniture, dairy equipment, hospital equipment and hundreds of other things.’
Advertisement, 1948.
There was a management buy out of the company in 1987, changing the name to TP Manipulations. The factory today operates as Liberty Tube Components.
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