About The GBVP
The GBVP [Great British Valve Project] is a plan to build a working heritage factory to manufacture audio valves primarily. The machinery we will utilise wherever possible was originally built and used by Mullard and Brimar and has been rescued from a number of locations across Europe. The biggest group of machines were rescued from a yard in Serbia where they had been left for fifteen years. Most of them had not been used since the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Having secured funding for the project from John Clapham of LabLogic Systems we negotiated a deal that saw twenty eight machines being loaded onto two articulated lorries and driven across Europe. The first batch were delivered early November 2017 to our workshop in Redditch.
Since then we have been cleaning and carrying out basic repairs in order to start the process of bringing them back to life and learning about their operation. It’s a very dirty job and also nasty at times with fine glass, tungsten wire clippings and years of detritus to be scraped away before we can start to lubricate, free up, and start the mechanical motion of the machine. Thankfully, we have a great band of volunteers who have worked hard to clean virtually all the machines in just over a year.
While all this has been going on, we have secured our new factory location – Tungsten Works which has had to be rewired, an air system designed and fitted and the interior partitions adjusted. Our clean machines will be moving in to their new home during 2019 when we will then start the commissioning process.
Our vision is for Tungsten Works to become a working heritage museum, self funded from the production and sale of valves and being a social enterprise employing disadvantaged workers and volunteers.
Help us to achieve our dream of UK manufactured valves – volunteer for the GBVP