Fine Tubes, Plymouth-based manufacturer of high-precision, high performance tubing products, celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. Fine Tubes supplies a wide range of advanced stainless steel, nickel alloy and titanium tubes for the most critical applications in the aerospace, medical, oil and gas, and energy industries.
Founded in Surbiton in 1943, Fine Tubes began construction of a 51,000 sq ft production facility in the northern part of Plymouth back in 1960 and then moved into its new factory in 1962. Since 2016, Fine Tubes has been part of the Specialty Metal Products division of AMETEK Inc., a global manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices with annualized sales of USD 4.8bn.
Its early success in the aerospace market began in 1957, when Fine Tubes started to supply tubing for the Vickers Viscount aircraft. In 1965 the company was manufacturing advanced stainless-steel alloy tubes for the Concorde, the world’s first supersonic airliner. By 1999 the company was manufacturing titanium tubing for the hydraulic systems aboard the Eurofighter.
In the medicine and health care, having already developed profiled implant tubing for medical applications 18 years ago, Fine Tubes began manufacturing advanced titanium tubing for femur and tibia bone nail implants in 2004. For the nuclear power industry, Fine Tubes began developing specialised tubes for the UK’s first generation of gas-cooled reactors back in the 1970s. As nuclear power evolved, so has the company’s expertise.
From the technological advances that came with early subsea drilling in the North Sea in the 1970s right up to the present day’s deep-water challenges, Fine Tubes helps the offshore oil and gas industry with the high-pressure tubing, required to extract subsea oil and gas from some of the most hostile downhole conditions.
Fine Tubes was chosen to supply 130km of cooling tubes for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In 2013, the company delivered the corrosion-resistant heat exchanger tubes for Spain’s ground-breaking Gemasolar power plant.
Fine Tubes was also contracted to supply the specialist titanium tubing for the Chemical Propulsion System aboard the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter that fly to within 45 million kilometres of the Sun, enduring powerful bursts of atomic particles from explosions in the solar atmosphere, to capture images of the solar poles for the first time.
