SUTCLIFFE CONSTRUCTION has got on its bike to find work – and has won the contract to build a £500,000 carbon fibre research and development centre for cycle component specialist Hope Technology.
Hope started as a subcontract machining business for the aerospace industry but 25 years ago owners Ian Weatherill and Simon Sharp began making disc brakes for their own bikes which gradually became a sideline and then the focus of the company.
It employs more than 100 people operating around the clock at its Barnoldswick factory and exports around half of its production.
Hope currently manufactures almost every part for a bicycle, including hubs, brakes, headset, stems, bottom brackets and lights, and this investment will enable it to manufacture the last remaining part – the frame.
It will be hiring carbon fibre specialists to work in the lab, which will be part of the 89,000 sq ft Hope Mill.
North Yorkshire construction company Sutcliffe will deliver the project, which requires a complex reworking of the old North Light Mill that it had rebuilt in 1996 for another company.
Hope Technology’s Mr Weatherill said “Sutcliffe is absolutely dead easy to work with – they sort out every problem so we can just concentrate on what we like doing best which is messing about with bikes and gearing up to expand when the R&D centre is ready to open.”
