Career Heroes - Thomas Nelson

Tell us more about you

Outside of work, my main hobby is football. I also enjoy DIY and have started to fabricate industrial-styled furniture made from pipework, barrels, scaffold etc.  I also do a considerable amount of charity work and aim for three campaigns per year. I absolutely love a holiday with my mates too.

What kind of work do you do?

High pressure die casting is the process of taking blocks of aluminium, melting them and injecting the molten metal into a mould to produce a nearly net shape part. Our parts are made for cars and our customers include Jaguar Landrover, VW, Ford, Peugeot and Citroen.

A Die Cast Engineer is responsible for the entire process, from metal in to casting out.

The job could not be more broad and every day is completely different. About 40% of the day is in the office and 60% out by the machine being ‘hands on’. There are even a few opportunities to travel to places like the US, Japan and France.

We begin by working with the customer (car manufacturer) and advising them on changes to make to their 3D model to make the part easier to manufacture. We specify what equipment we need to cast the part, this could require robot upgrades, saw units or a new conveyor belt.

Following this we carry out trial casting, we change the process and review quality results to find optimum parameters, changing speeds, pressures, metal temperatures and cooling. The part will then go into mass production, a die cast engineer will monitor daily production and carry out checks like thermal imaging and then respond as required to breakdowns or ideally fixes before breakdown with early detection.

As a Die Cast Engineer, your role would then include trying to reduce scrap, machine downtime and cost of manufacture. This involves leading various maintenance teams and also implementing solutions yourself. Designing and wiring automation systems with sensors, suggesting mould design changes, fabricating fixtures and plumbing to improve and prevent future problems. We also design the lubrication system, fabricate the lubrication tool, write the lubrication robot program and input on the part movement robot programs

We also create standards and work instructions to help the people on the floor and train the rest of the factory to improve their knowledge and strive for the highest standard of work we can maintain. The job in summary is find a problem, find the root cause, fix it then make sure it can’t happen again.

The final part of my role is training apprentices. They work with myself all day and learn on the job. They are also given increasingly complex projects as their skill level develops. Seeing an apprentice develop to the level where they are good enough to be a full engineer is probably the most rewarding part of the job.

How did you become a Die Cast Engineer?

At GCSE level I did particularly well in Maths and Physics. I then went on to do A levels and then at University, I picked mechanical engineering (it’s the most broad and the best engineering degree if you’re not 100% on what job you want to do).

If you could do-over, What would you do differently?

I’m very proud of my degree but I’d give serious consideration to an apprenticeship in engineering if I was 18 again.

University is really expensive and the apprenticeship guys are getting paid, getting experience and are more or less guaranteed a job at the end of University.