Established 22 years ago, Carlton Engineering offers fabrication, welding and general engineering services to the forestry sector with a flair for bespoke projects. Forestry Journal paid a visit to John Carlton at his workshop in Moffat to learn more.
CONSIDER 1998, the year Carlton Engineering was founded. For most readers, it probably doesn’t feel like very long ago at all. But when you pause to consider it was the last time Scotland qualified for the World Cup, it begins to feel like ancient history, a distant half-remembered era in a bygone age. Think about it like that and you’ll realise Carlton Engineering has been in business for quite some time now. For owner John Carlton, the realisation, dawning in the middle of an interview with Forestry Journal, was a bit of a shock.
Based in Moffat, Dumfries, the 22-year-old firm provides fabrication, welding and engineering services for the forestry, plant and commercial vehicle industries, as well as general engineering.
Services include excavator alterations and modifications, forestry protection, forestry plough manufacture and refurbishment, as well as excavator bucket manufacture and repair.
It has, over the years, earned an enviable reputation as a specialist in bespoke products for end users, taking a positive approach to unusual and even unique projects.
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On Forestry Journal’s visit to the yard, evidence of the company’s work was all around, from excavators being fitted with forestry guarding to ploughs awaiting refurbishment, newly built digger buckets and customised fuel tanks.
When he started out, John was mostly hired to work on commercial vehicles, with little from the world of forestry. Today, however, that situation has been turned on its head.
“Over the last 10 years, forestry has become around 70 per cent of our work,” he said. “There’s been a change in the working climate, locally. The owner-drivers related to quarrying have disappeared, while the forestry industry seems to be booming.
“The vast majority of our work comes from the restocking and forest road building sectors, split about fifty-fifty between refurbishments and new builds. We do a lot of refurbishment of excavator buckets and forestry ploughs, also manufacturing new buckets and forestry ploughs. To start with it was just one every now and again, but then restocking new sites became very popular, so we ended up doing a lot of them. We get a good amount of repeat business through that. We’ve also refurbished a number of mounders, which are becoming more and more popular.”
Among the buckets littering the yard, brought in for refurbishment, John could point to a couple he built himself, over 15 years ago, as well as some brand-new builds, awaiting collection.
“Everything starts as flat plate,” he said. “We use a CNC plasma machine to cut all the shapes we need. Our philosophy changed massively when we bought it two years ago. It was a big investment at the time, but now I wish I’d made it sooner. We couldn’t live without it.
“Instead of getting plate or flat bar and cutting it by hand, you just walk through to the plasma machine, change the steel plates over, put the AutoCAD drawings in and it cuts it. It’s a lot quicker and much more efficient than cutting by hand. You save a lot of time and the job looks more professional. I’ve just invested in a set of steel plate rollers too, which will be invaluable for rolling the bottoms of the buckets and other fabrications. You can never have enough tools in the toolbox.”
On the day of Forestry Journal’s visit, the focus of attention in the workshop was a new Doosan DX225LC excavator, the latest addition to the fleet of S Richardson Contracting in Dumfriesshire.
In addition to tree felling and thinning, the company undertakes road and track maintenance on Forestry Commission and private land, tree replanting projects and land ploughing contracts prior to replanting.
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Company owner Simon Richardson is a regular customer of Carlton Engineering, which fits forestry guarding on all its machines.
“Most of the plates we cut will go under the machine,” explained John. “An excavator like this will have minimal plating when it comes in, but there are a number of gaps, for different reasons, varying by machine. If you’re using it on a building site, that wouldn’t matter, but in the forestry world you run the risk of branches and tree stumps coming up through the holes and causing damage to cables and pipework that will put the machine out of action.”
Different contractors have different ideas about the kind of modifications they want on their machines to protect them in hazardous terrain. In the case of S Richardson, that means adding thick plates to completely cover hydraulic distribution on the underside and elsewhere, adding track guides to strengthen the tracks and prevent them splaying, adding LED lights and installing window grills on the cab.
“Other operators have different specifications for their machinery,” said John. “We will adapt and manufacture to their needs.”
Carlton Engineering’s yard is the same one from which John’s father used to operate his haulage business – a business John may well have joined himself, if he’d been able.
“Unfortunately, you can’t drive a lorry when you’re 16, so I went off to get a trade instead,” he said. “I served my time in Dumfries, moving on to Clarks of Parkgate for five or six years, then a period of time doing structural steel work. It has all been fantastic work experience.
“Evenings and weekends were taken up doing bits for the haulage business and stuff for others. In the haulage business, we always refurbished aluminium tipper bodies to suit the businesses of the time. It was great experience and enjoyable.”
After the lorries left in the morning, the workshop would be empty for the rest of the day, so John asked if he could make use of it.
He took some examples of his work to 1998’s Moffat Show to advertise his services and had his official first day on 1 September that year, though the venture was a bit of a gamble.
“When I started out, I didn’t actually have any work lined up,” he said. “I took a big punt. But it quickly took off. I did a lot of aluminium body repairs and stuff like that.
It was good.
“They were very different times to today. I didn’t have a mobile phone or any staff. I just worked away myself, on my own, and could only fall out with myself. And as demand grew, so did the business.
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“I only had one quiet time, when I was about eight months in, when I started to worry I’d made a mistake. But I had no mortgage, I wasn’t married and only had myself to worry about, so I knew if the worst came to it I could have just closed the doors. Since then, it’s continually grown. Now I wish I could get a quiet day.”
Carlton Engineering’s team has grown and shrunk over the years. During that time, John’s dad came off the trucks due to health issues and he has been in the workshop every day since. Now, at the age of 79, he is still putting in shifts and keeping everyone right. Currently, the only other full-time member of the team is Derrick Dalling, who worked with John at his first employment in Dumfries after leaving school and later at Clark Engineering, and brings with him decades of experience.
“It’s scary when you start to think about how long we’ve been doing this,” John admitted. “Myself and Derrick probably have 60 years of experience between us in forestry engineering.”
Occasionally, Derrick’s son will also pitch in, when he’s not studying engineering at college. Ideally, John would like another member on the team, but with the way of the world at the moment, they’ll persevere as they are. John’s son Andrew is still at school, but has an engineering incline, so time will tell.
“We do manage to get through everything between us,” he said. “We may have a laugh, but we crack on and the work gets done. I believe we do the job to the best of our abilities and we will go the extra mile. Cosmetics, to me, is quite an important thing. Whether it’s me, Derrick, my dad or anyone else who’s worked here in the past, we’ve all had the same approach. It has to look right and be functional. Nothing leaves here unless I’m happy with it. Once in a while that can cause some friction, but the important thing is I know that when a machine leaves here, it’s not coming back any time soon.”
Like all businesses, Carlton Engineering has had its highs and lows, but it’s not so easy to say which camp 2020 falls into.
“It’s been strange,” John said. “Up until 22 March, the day before we went into lockdown, we were flying. After that, I worked away myself for the first six weeks, before Derrick came back. Once he returned, we had an enjoyable first month, one of the most pleasurable I’ve had in my working life for many years. There was great a flow, customers were happy and there wasn’t a backlog of jobs to be done.
“Since July, it’s all picked back up. It’s been absolutely fantastic. 2021 will be interesting. As it stands, we’ve got work booked in for a good period of time in front of ourselves. And we’ve got some very interesting projects lined up.”
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The walls of John’s office are adorned with pictures of impressive and unusual jobs completed over the years, from guarded diggers and refurbished tipper bodies to aluminium sheep pens, the sluice gate to a water turbine, a fence post driver built from scratch and the balcony on a customer’s house. Is it fair to say he attracts unique projects?
“I think we do, because there aren’t many people willing to take on the unusual,” said John. “We do not-the-norm. Bespoke products are our speciality. It’s exciting for us when we’re asked to do something we’ve never done before. And it helps attract business. Your last job is your best advert.”
As well as relying on word of mouth to bring in new customers, John has had good results from print advertising and social media.
“Facebook’s a wonderful thing,” he said. “We do get quite a lot of work through it. It’s a great platform for any business to promote what they do. I post pictures now and again to show what we’ve been working on. It’s a great way to advertise, because it proves to people we’re multi-talented and it’s not just local. Someone in Wick or Devon is as likely to see it as someone in Moffat. And if you get something from that, then great. We get enquiries from across the country because of things people have seen on Facebook.”
Of course, an enquiry isn’t the same as a commission and John feels his open mind to unusual jobs and approach to customer service is what makes the difference in turning a query into paid work.
“We do things that others don’t, no question about that, and I do think it makes us stand out from others,” he said. “Whether it be a repair, a refurbishment or a new build, in whatever sector it may be (forestry, commercial vehicle, plant, domestic), we aim to give the customer great service.”
For updates on the latest projects from Carlton Engineering, look them up on Facebook or Instagram.
For enquiries, call John Carlton on 07754689257 or 01683 220582.
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