Oh yes.... I worked there as a temp for SOS Industrial Staff Bureau in 1979, after graduating from Wolverhampton Poly.
At that time they were making all kinds of bikes, I seem to remember they made Vindec, Edwardes, Brown Brothers and a few others. Mostly they made crappy shopping bikes but there were also some racing bikes and a heavy export model, which they sent to China or India, would you believe! It was black and chrome with a massive rack and I think it was called Flying Pigeon though I may have got that somewhere else. I worked mostly in the packing section wrapping bikes in cardboard sleeves, they were then thrown into the back of a container stacked two high on wooden frames. They were damned heavy to lift into the container by hand.
The factory made everything from the frames upwards; there was an area where they were brazing frame parts in jigs, heating them up with gas flames then applying braze to the red hot joint. The frames weighed a ton. After the brazing they were pickled then washed in hot water then hung on a conveyor and painted in a static booth, which had a spinning disc that went up and down spraying paint everywhere. After that the frames went through an oven, I remember seeing the Asian guys dashing inside the end of the oven and putting their chapattis on a shelf inside to warm up. The fire risk was high with the paint sprayer and static electricity and the alarm used to go off quite often; when that happened everybody downed tools and legged it for the exits because they knew that within a few seconds the whole factory was going to be flooded with CO2 unless somebody hit the cancel button.
The frames used to come out with their forks hanging in the head tube, quite often water had boiled inside the frames and dribbled out of the drain holes ruining the paint so one of my jobs was to sit with sandpaper, rub off the bubbly mess and take the frames back round for a second run through. What a waste!
After the frames had been painted they went over to the assembly area where the Asian lads used to set about them with presses and mallets, fitting headsets and BBs and generally making a lot of noise and clatter. There were always bits of bikes lying around on the floor, which I used to pick up and smuggle out, though I never got round to building myself a bike out of them - mostly they were cheap pressed steel, I don't remember seeing any decent alloy parts. I've still got some frame stickers I liberated. I was always amazed that all the right bits seemed to end up being stuck on the right bikes because I couldn't see any pattern or apparent organisation.
I also had a job driving the Transit box van, shuttling the wheels from another factory a few miles away where rows of Asian women were lacing wheels together with amazing speed; they would take a handful of spokes, splay them between their fingers then lace them deftly into the rim and screw on the nipples. There was one bloke who did the trueing and I remember watching him with his gauge showing up and down and sideways movement; he was the king of the wheel department. The clutch on the van went and it drove like a sort of automatic, the engine revving and the van crawling along at snail's pace. I used to rev it like hell in the hope that it would conk out completely.
I also had the job of taping the handlebars of the racers; I got quite good after thousands of them but now I know that I was doing them all the wrong way, from the inside outwards. I got some good callouses on my fingers from the vinyl tape.
The factory was managed by a youngish bloke called Steve, who everybody disliked on principle. One morning we came in to work and found that the night security Alsatian had been taken short and nipped off a massive pile right in the middle of the factory floor. Nobody wanted to clear it up so we spent the morning avoiding it like a roundabout while it sat there honking away. At one moment I looked up and saw Steve heading purposefully my way, clearly on a mission to give me some task or other. I tried in vain to warn him that right between us was the Alsatian roundabout but it was too late and everybody watched as Steve walked straight into it, nearly skidding on his heel. The whole shop floor roared with laughter and Steve just spluttered "Get this cleaned up!" while trying to wipe the stuff off his shoe onto the floor.
There was a fat greasy obnoxious shop steward called Keith who everybody feared, he was the QC bloke; he used to inspect the bikes before I packed them. His job was to bend the brakes with a big screwdriver so as to parallel them to the rims. On two occasions I saw Keith pick up bikes and throw them bodily across the factory in a rage; nobody ever argued with Keith. There was a really nice, quiet old bloke who did the cleaning and one morning, after he had spent ages sweeping all the rubbish into a big pile, obnoxious Keith came storming across and deliberately kicked all the rubbish all over the floor.
They were crap bikes, they weighed a ton and nowadays would probably qualify as BSOs. Still, I used to enjoy working there and it was a laugh a minute. I remember the ghastly women in the packing section complaining to the foreman, a lovely bloke called Arthur if I recall, because my jeans were so filthy, I must have smelled quite bad I guess. Can't remember how much I was paid but it must have been around £1.30 an hour because the best temping job was at Ferro in Wombourne, where you got a whopping £1.75 an hour because the conditions were so dangerous. I got electrocuted there but that's another story.....
