A Manchester-headquartered maker of industrial chain, gears and couplings, founded by Swiss-born engineer Hans Renold in 1879 and credited with inventing the bush roller chain.
Renold makes the chain, gears and couplings that transmit power inside machines. Its products include industrial transmission, conveyor and leaf chain, gears and gearboxes, couplings, freewheel clutches, sprockets and vibratory drives. These are used in places as varied as escalators, subways, power plants, cement works, farm machinery and chocolate production. Renold says it has an unsurpassed reputation for innovation, design and manufacturing skill and describes itself as the oldest transmission chain company in the world, which is a claim made by the company and repeated in trade press.
Hans Renold was born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1852 and moved to Manchester in 1873. In 1879 he bought a small textile chain business in Salford, using £300 borrowed from his future father-in-law. In 1880 he invented the bush roller chain, the design on which modern precision roller chains are built, and the safety bicycle later helped create huge demand. The firm moved to Brook Street in Manchester in 1881, built Progress Works in 1889 and Renold Works at Burnage in 1906. It merged with the Coventry Chain Company in 1930 and later became Renold plc. Renold is also credited, with Alexander Hamilton Church, with introducing scientific management ideas to England.
We could not read Renold's values page, so there is no stated mission to quote. What the sources show is a long emphasis on quality and long product life, on lower maintenance and lower emissions, and on renewable energy, with rooftop solar at its German plant. The company's story also includes the Hans Renold Social Union, supported in 1909 to give employees activities and leisure, which suggests an early interest in looking after its people.
Renold's group head office is at Manchester Green, Styal Road, Wythenshawe, Manchester, and its registered office is there too. The company reports operations in almost 20 countries, and its largest production facility by revenue is in Einbeck, Germany, which was bought in 1963. A UK gear business, Renold Gears, is listed as a member of the British Gear Association in a search result, but we did not read that page, so its details are unverified. Group headcount was not found in the pages we read.
Chain and gear manufacturing involves design and test engineers, machinists and CNC operators, heat treatment and metallurgy specialists, quality and laboratory staff, and sales, finance and supply chain teams. The Einbeck plant says it values a mix of long-serving experienced staff and younger workers, and open communication. If you enjoy maths, physics, materials science, design and technology or computing, chain design is a good example of old engineering being modernised with robotics and automation. The company's own website lists current roles.
Website: www.renold.com
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