GETTING the right blend - that's a Bury company which has made a significant investment of more than £250,000 to boost production.

The money has funded a new fully automated powder and aggregate blending plant for industrial flooring specialist, John Lord.

And the investment has allowed the company, located in Ainsworth Road, to enhance production while delivering even greater consistency and quality in its flooring compounds.

The plant at the company's headquarters features state-of-the-art IBC computer control of the blending process, which is pre-programmed to produce a range of different product and colour mixes. The new plant has also eliminated much of the heavy manual labour involved in the blending area, delivering twice the output with half the manpower.

Manual filling of hoppers has been replaced by an automated unit which simultaneously takes up to six 2.5 tonne bags of aggregate.

The plant is capable of fulfilling up to 60 20kg packs per hour for John Lord products, used exclusively in their contract flooring installations.

The total output will be raised to 100 packs per hour with additional investment which will incorporate a unique and complex metering system to ensure uniform product coloration on the high speed batching process.

Managing director Stephen Lord commented: "At John Lord, we are involved in the manufacture of the flooring product as well as the installation and commissioning so we can guarantee quality at every stage for our customers.

"With the increasingly sophisticated mix recipes we are developing to produce advanced performance floors, the consistency of the product is a prime consideration and the new plant is an important step in our continued process of improvement."

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