• • • EDITOR’S INTERVIEW • • • “Some months later we were doing an


exhibition in Germany and the engineer from Siemens who’d been in charge of the project came along to the stand and asked where the Cable Guide Clamp was on the stand and we explained that we were not showing it. “The engineer said that it all worked and had


been a massive success, which for a product sketched on a beer mat on a North Sea ferry and initially presented as wholly untried prototype was quite the achievement. It’s called the Cable Guide Clamp because it guides and clamps cables, and even today there’s nothing like it in the market anywhere.” Mr Shaw said that he has enjoyed his time at


Ellis Patents. “I’ve been working with interesting, stimulating


people, both at board level and within the operational side of the business,” he said. “We have a lot of homegrown talent, people


“Siemens was doing a project in the North Sea


for a wind turbine installation,” Mr Shaw said. “Basically they’ve got all these wind turbines,


and it has what looks like an oil rig in the middle of them all, which is actually an electrical substation. All the wind turbines are connected to this one substation, where they convert the energy from the wind turbines into DC electricity, and then they have a single cable to shore. “Siemens had designed the entire project, but


were struggling with how to install six quite huge cables. The substation was 100 metres long and six storeys high and these six cables had to wind their way through this structure, through bulkheads, floors, etc..” Siemens’ question was simple – how would


Ellis Patents go about installing the cables. Mr Shaw said: “We had absolutely no idea. We


came back to the UK and had some ideas, but we didn’t come up with a proper solution. Then we got called to a second meeting with the constructor of the platform and Siemens in Rotterdam. We went over on the ferry and in the meeting, we were asked again how the problem could be fixed. “We went back that night on the ferry and we’re


sitting in the bar and I reckon that two pints is the exact quantity of beer to have sensible design conversations. We sketched out a design of a product called that would guide the cables into place and then securely clamp them. “We called it the Cable Guide Clamp. It looked a


bit like a venturi. It was plastic, came in two halves and would gimbal. The idea was you could put these things all the way down the route of where the cables were going to go and then feed them through like a snake before clamping them in place with the top half – which basically turned these cable guides into fully operational cable cleats. “We drew it up and we went back to Germany


with our proposed solution – Siemens said it was great and wanted to use it straightaway, but we said it was only a prototype and we didn’t know if it would work in practice. Siemens said it had a trial installation on the coast of the Baltic in three


electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • DECEMBER 2021/JANUARY 2022 11


weeks and said that it would need 10 of these samples to see if theyworked. “We basically started machining up these


things – it cost thousands to do – and off we went to the Baltic coast. There were a host of engineers there to watch this trial and a good few of them were shaking their heads, thinking this was not going to work. They installed them all, and they pulled the cable through, and it worked. We knew that their delivery time was so tight, that if it didn’t work, we didn’t know what we were going to do.” Mr Shaw continued: “We’d been so confident in


the product that we started making the tooling before we went to do the trial – at our risk and our expense – on the basis that we were going to be successful and when we were successful, they would give us an order and they did. “We delivered it on time and didn’t hear


anything else


from the area who want to live in this part of North Yorkshire and that’s given us tremendous labour stability. Seeing people who’ve come from the local area, who have developed to people of international standing, has been a real pleasure too.” Ellis Patents has put a number of shares into an


employee share scheme, so employees can benefit from the dividends. “It’s designing the business for the long term,


not in a way that most businesses would do,” Mr Shaw said. Ahead of the pandemic, Ellis Patents built two


new warehouses, which provides 14,000 square feet of warehouse space. “We put a solar panel installation on the roof,


with 408 solar panels – a £150,000 investment,” Mr Shaw said. “On a sunny day, we can generate 50% of the


power that the factory consumes; there’s something very circular about the fact that we’re generating electricity, and we’re powering our own vehicles in the car park as well.”


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