Owlesbury Crankshaft Service
20th century skills meets state of the art 21st century kit
You can always tell when you walk into a good a machine shop… it is busy... and OCS (Owlesbury Crankshaft Services) has a very busy machine shop. During our visit we were welcomed with open arms, but as soon as the business of photography was done, it was back to work for the team of trained engineers.
Based in Winchester, Hampshire – OCS’S reputation has been built over 40 years and today it offers a wide range of machining services for cars and bikes. It takes in motorsport, marine applications, commercial fleets and agricultural machinery as well as general engineering repairs and classic engine restoration.
The team machine cylinderheads, blocks, crankshafts and engine components using the latest technologies, equipment and software to produce race quality results for motorsport and non-motorsport customers alike. The boys are experts in reboring and lining, surface grinding, crack detecting, helicoiling, pressure testing, con-rod repairs and service disk grinding. But they don’t rebuild engines here. Why?
‘We do one part of a process really, really well. That’s why we have such a lot of repeat business,’ says Chief Engineer, Mike Betteridge. ‘Engine building is a slightly different art form, so we keep our parameters clear and avoid diversifying outside of our engineering remit.’ The shop is full of state of the art machinery that works to greater tolerances than the machines that manufactured the engines they restore. Just one of them, the Rottler Honer HP6A provides efficiency and precision under computer control. OCS has also just entered the world of laser welding. It means it can repair visible cracks on cylinder heads as a true weld and not a spray. Laser welding can weld cold so will not distort the material on delicate parts such as cylinderheads and crank cases. OCS offers a free no obligation quotation service. It is accredited by the Federation of Engine Remanufacturers (FER) and has some pretty impressive testimonials. As we write the company is working on a Jensen Interceptor engine and Ford Essex V6 for Practical Classics – both of which will appear in a future issue of the magazine.