If you were at the Olympic Park this summer you probably walked across some timber decking. Quite a lot of it in fact. One person who took particular pride on the Olympic boardwalk was Christian Brash, chairman of John Brash & Co. He may have taken just as many photos of the deck boards as the venues themselves because his company supplied about 95% of the anti-slip timber decking on the Park, roughly 78,000 linear metres.
For a company that is fiercely patriotic and proud of its British manufacturing heritage, to be involved in the iconic Olympic event in London must have been a highlight in its 107-year history.
The Gainsborough-based roof batten, scaffold board, decking and cedar shingle/shake manufacturer has been busy of late. As well as the Olympic contract, it has been campaigning for higher roof batten quality standards and investing in a fire retardant treatment facility for its scaffold boards.
But sitting down with Christian Brash and Chris Watson, the company’s managing director, the talk initially is of the Games.
The project clearly involved much development work and discussions with the exacting Olympic authorities, eventually resulting in a new product – CitiDeck.
The company had to jump through some hoops to get the contract – first getting onto the Olympic Timber Supply Panel and then coming up with a deck board that would tick all the boxes.
John Brash had been producing anti-slip boards for 10 years – its JB AntiSlip Plus brand has grey resin-based aggregate inserts which provide slip resistance.
Christian Brash said the Olympics required a good-looking smooth deck board with the right abrasive anti-slip performance to cater for thousands of wheelchair users, prams and the less able coming to the Park.
He said that while grooved deck boards accounted for the lion’s share of the softwood decking market, more and more customers wanted the natural look of a smooth board with a good grip performance.
"Ribbed deck boards are more slippery without inserts," he said. "And trying to clean them is difficult."
Anti-slip evolution
Testing of a new white-coloured aggregate on a smooth board – what Mr Brash calls the third or fourth evolution of the anti-slip process – resulted in a less abrasive grit to provide a more even surface for the less able.
"We ended up having a better product than we had before," he said. CitiDeck was born.
Decking hasn’t been the only product creating waves this summer for John Brash. The company has also been taking the bull by the horns in the roofing batten market.
It cites several important developments, including the NHBC now requiring BS 5534 graded battens on its sites and the Health & Safety Executive revising its roof work guidelines to recognise that pre-graded 25x50mm battens can be used as a foothold.
It courted controversy with its recent decision to publish a report into graded batten quality. The report, commissioned by John Brash and completed by consultancy The Wood Shop, was posted on its JB Best of British website. It named competitors’ products and their corresponding test results, alleging massive failings in the quality of BS 5534 marked products tested, as well as suspected fraudulent BS marking.
TTJ’s phone lines were red hot in the weeks that followed, with other batten suppliers – mainly of imported products – protesting at the publication and disputing its findings.
John Brash removed the report from the website when requested to do so by the National Federation of Roofing Contractors and Mr Watson said the company was happy to do so as the subsequent dispute had been deflecting from the central purpose of the report’s publication, which was to increase batten quality.
But he added that the report had certainly increased awareness of the issue and shown that battens marked with the BS grade don’t necessarily measure up.
"With the trade being under a lot of price pressure, if the product ticks the boxes with the grade mark, some people don’t want to look any further," said Mr Watson.
"If we could work with everybody in the industry to raise standards, that would be for the best for everybody."
Christian Brash said policing of the BS standard was a problem.
"Battens have been around for so long. But they suddenly now have to meet standards and it’s not an easy standard to meet because it’s a high-grade structural use."
He added that traditional batten raw material sources were not always up to the job.
John Brash has upped the regularity of its own internal quality checks for the BBAcertified JB-RED batten. Previously monthly, it has incorporated the audits into its daily manufacturing and quality checking processes, to ensure that battens meet the required standards of BS 5534. In the interests of transparency it is also publishing the results of its own grading results online.
The company is spreading its message on the JB-Best of British website, launched this summer, and has also produced campaign T-shirts for merchants and distributors, complete with Union Jack motifs promoting the JB-RED batten.
"Demand for BS graded battens from general timber and builders merchants has not really taken off yet, but for specialist distributors it has done," said Mr Brash, adding that JB-RED sales are up 75% since the start of the year.
The company says its £2m batten manufacturing facility is the only line in England wholly dedicated to battens. It features Weinig LuxScan and CombiScan scanning technology, a Ledinek moulder and grade printing equipment.
It can process over 600,000 pieces of timber every month, grading at 48 pieces per minute or 15mph, compared with about 0.3mph for manual grading.
Wood raw materials are sourced from numerous locations, typically Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, with almost all the leading European sawmills among John Brash’s suppliers. Its policy is to source small amounts from a wide supply base.
Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria are preferred sources for scaffold board raw material, due to their ability to supply in longer 4m-plus lengths.
Current scaffold board production is 30,000-35,000m3 annually and machine grading of boards is completed by a Micromatic scanner, while a Speed Bander applies the band and plates simultaneously. Many housing contractor clients also want John Brash to apply their branding on boards as identification to stop thieves stealing them from construction sites.
In-house fire treatment
Previously, John Brash sub-contracted firetreatment of boards to third-party treaters but this year the company installed its own dedicated on-site fire retardant treatment facility – the only European manufacturer of timber scaffold boards to do so. The £150,000 development heralded the launch of JB FireSafe fire retardant-treated scaffold boards.
The product is designed to meet increasing demand for fire retardant-treated scaffold boards across multiple sectors, including high-risk environments such as London underground and on- and off-shore oil and gas plants.
The company believes JB FireSafe – treated with Osmose FirePro – will offer reduced lead times through a shorter supply chain, streamlined logistics and costs and treatment to Euroclass B or C (equivalent to BS 476 Class 0 or 1).
"The market for fire-proof scaffold boards is reasonably strong," said Mr Brash, "but very seasonal. Most of the boards being fire-treated are for the export market."
Back in 2006-2007 John Brash was sending 250,000 scaffold boards to Qatar and Dubai annually. Although the Middle East market has reduced somewhat some big orders are still coming in, such as an Italian contract for 20,000 fire-treated boards destined for the Nigerian oil industry.
But across the business, John Brash’s close links with the lukewarm housebuilding sector has inevitably meant reduced overall production volumes.
The 12-acre site at Gainsborough still looks busy, but Mr Watson said today’s economic landscape was very different from pre-financial crisis levels.
"In 2007 we were bringing in something like 35 full lorry loads of raw timber a day. This was when the UK was building 200,000 houses per year." In fact, he added, the high throughput on the narrow road leading to the factory required a traffic manager on site.
However, like many companies, John Brash had to restructure in 2008 to adapt to the new landscape.
In 2007, when the housing market was still buoyant, more than 200 people worked at the company. The number is just under half that figure now. Production capacity is currently 90,000-120,000m3 a year, compared with an installed capacity of 200,000m3.
Looking to value-added solutions in such a market becomes important.
The company’s recent development of JB ShingleFix with Paslode is an example. It is designed to cut installation times and costs involved with specifying cedar shingles.
The system involves using a specially developed stainless steel staple instead of nails to fix the shingle into place, which John Brash says reduces installation times by 50% on standard roofs.
"Beforehand shingles were an expensive roof but this brings prices down towards machine-made clay tiles," said Mr Brash. "Timber roofs then suddenly have a much bigger market."
Other initiatives include promoting CitiDeck to architects and specifiers, as well as future improvements to graded batten production in order to boost yields still further.
