The History & Profile of the Company - 1972 - Present day
Originally formed in 1972 as Omega Racing Components Ltd. The company's activities at this time included, piston manufacture, repairs to racing motorcycle crank shafts, the preparation and tuning of high performance 2-stroke engines and four stroke single cylinder engines for speedway racing. Cylinder liners, both ported and plain were also manufactured.
The swift expansion of piston manufacturing soon overtook our other activities and the decision was made to concentrate on the production of pistons only. Initially only die-cast pistons were produced but, because of our speedway contacts it was decided to produce a forged piston for speedway applications.
Later in 1972 the company name was changed to Omega Pistons Ltd and to this day two of it's original directors are still with the company, they are Bengt Andersson; Company Chairman and Fred Hadley; Managing Director. Fred's son Philip Hadley is also a director and has been with the company since 1982 in full capacity, though from the age of 14 he was actually working in the foundry on Saturday mornings producing piston castings.
The forging side of the business soon outpaced the die-cast side and due to the high cost of externally sourced forgings it was decided in 1979 to build our own forging press. This was commissioned in 1980 and we have produced our own forgings ever since. With the continued growth of the business and the increasing complexity of forging design, a new forging shop was built in 1991 and a new press was designed and built solely for the production of piston forgings.
At the moment, the capacity of the forging plant can produce five hundred forgings per eight hour shift, which easily exceeds that of our machine shop.
In 1997 a second factory was purchased and our foundry was moved to the site. At the same time we installed a state of the art heat treatment plant for the heat treatment of all of the alloys used. This now means that except for the purchase of raw materials, the company is totally independent of outside suppliers.
In 1998 a total update of our design office was needed. We installed a purpose built design office with full 2D, 3D, and solid modelling facilities. We also have a state of the art inspection department with a reference standard Co-ordinate Measuring Machine and specially modified computer controlled equipment to measure the ovality and vertical profile to one tenth of a micron (.0001mm).
Our machining plant currently houses six 4-axis CNC machining centres, five 3-axis CNC vertical milling machines, seven 2-axis CNC turning lathes and two 4-axis PC controlled profile turning lathes along with numerous manual and automatic conventional machines.
All of our machines are maintained to the highest order and are capable of machining to very close tolerances using the latest developments available in cutting tool technology.
In 2001 we installed state of the art 3D CAM (Computer Aided Machining) software allowing us to machine small batch prototypes from solid billets.
In December 2009, Omega Pistons Ltd acquired Accralite Pistons and moved the entire facility, including most of the staff members, into their Halesowen facility. Both companies continue to operate under the same roof with Omega's technology being applied to the Accralite pistons.
In 2010 a bespoke designed database and production control computer system was implemented throughout the company.
In January 2011, Mr Krister Andersson was made a director of the company.
April 2012 saw Mr Andrew Baker promoted to General Manager. Andrew now oversees the production scheduling of the pistons and the day to day running of Omega Pistons.
| Christian Iddon Sponsorship Omega Pistons are proud to sponsor Christian Iddon in this years British Superbike Championship. |
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Jan O. Pedersen Sponsorship Omega Pistons are proud to be the official sponsors of the Jan O. Pedersen Speedway Academy. |
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