OurServices
Our Services
Situated in the beautiful Teme Valley located north west of Worcester, Teme Valley Heritage Engineers are within easy reach of the West Midlands and have completed work as far afield as East Anglia and the Scottish borders. The company is based in rural surroundings and have workshop space totalling over 7000 square feet, enabling large components to be worked on easily. In addition to mill work, we have successfully rebuilt and restored a variety of historic buildings and machinery, from barns, roofs and houses to steam engines, threshing machines and horse drawn vehicles. Our restoration, maintenance and millwrighting consultancy have previously undertaken:
Wind and Watermill restoration
Windmills have been a unique and beautiful part of the British landscape for many hundreds of years. Despite the fact that Britain could once boast nearly as many mills as the Netherlands, there are unfortunately very few that still remain, and even fewer capable of work.
Windmills have been a unique and beautiful part of the British landscape for many hundreds of years. Despite the fact that Britain could once boast nearly as many mills as the Netherlands, there are unfortunately very few that still remain, and even fewer capable of work.
Teme Valley Heritage Engineers are proud to have been involved with the restoration of many windmills, and we assist with the maintenance to keep one of the few remaining true commercial windmills grinding, at Whissendine in Rutland.
Teme Valley Heritage intimately know how these unique structures work, understanding the complex marriage of mechanical and structural considerations coming together to form a dynamic combination of building and machine. Through many years of fault finding and remedial work, we offer extensive experience in the maintenance, rebuilding and restoration of windmills.
The windmills of Britain exhibit remarkable aesthetic and mechanical variations between counties, for which they are famed, and these should be a primary consideration in any conservation work undertaken on them. It is essential that windmills are treated sensitively, as very often poorly executed repairs or misinformed restorations result in the loss of this regional character. Due to the complicated dynamic loads that a cap and sails impart on the windmill tower, erroneous restorations often result in structural damage to the mill which becomes very complicated and costly to rectify. They can be deceptively complex machines to correctly understand and great care must be excercised as we are, after all, merely custodians who are entrusted with the care of these buildings over just a short interval of their history.
After more than fifteen years working on a spectrum of projects, Teme Valley Heritage Engineers can perform any necessary fault finding, repairs and maintenance on any type of windmill. We can repair, rebuild, or where necessary replace any internal machinery, from upright shafts, timber gearing, flour sifting machines and stone furniture to patterns and castings for iron gears. We are able to manufacture new sails and caps of all varieties and sympathetically repair existing ones, and can also source, dress and set up millstones.
Whether simply performing repairs, making an accurate cap or sails for a converted mill tower, or returning a mill to full working order, and everything in between, get in contact with TVHE to see what we can do for your windmill. Visit the watermill tab for details on our millstone building, dressing and setting services.
Watermills and Stone Dressing
Teme Valley Heritage Engineering have over 25 watermill projects under their belt, with a vast range of experience from small repairs to major restoration schemes. Projects completed have involved repair and manufacture of all watermill components, including new build wheels (often copied from broken castings), sluices, wheel shafts, gudgeons, bearings and gearing.
Waterwheels can be particularly difficult components to restore correctly and unfortunately there are plenty of places where you can get one fabricated cheaply which will often result in poor operation and always in having little heritage credibility. Fortunately, we have the ability to manufacture patterns from old and broken castings and can accurately reproduce the historically correct wheel for your mill. Furthermore, we have the ability to connect waterwheels to produce electricity using a generator, and are also looking at restoring and providing water turbines for this purpose. Check out our 'Heritage Hydro' tab for more information.
TVHE can also offer some rarer skills such as building up new French burr millstones, and setting up and balancing the stones & spindles to work optimally. We are one of the few firms that still undertake stone dressing regularly and this is among the most important work required to keep a mill grinding food quality flour. Whether you have old stones which need to be repaired before returning to service, have stones which need to be kept in top condition, or need to source new stones for your mill, Teme Valley Heritage Engineering can assist. One set of burr stones which we recently installed are now used to supply two Michelin star restaurants in Birmingham and we are no strangers to the exacting demands of food production on mill machinery.
Restoration of historic buildings and machines
Many of the wind and watermills we look after are timber framed, so it has been a natural progression for TVHE to expand into timber frame repairs. Prior to the start of industrialised brick manufacture, our local area had a strong tradition for timber frame construction and many buildings of this construction can still be found today. We have progressively been asked to repair an increasingly diverse range of ancient buildings, and following much success are now offering this as a service. Past projects have included complete new frames, new oak floor spine beams, trusses and purlins, and repairs ranging from new sole plates (cill of a timber panel) to splicing in parts of frames which have moved, broken or rotted out though old age or suboptimal past repairs.Our expertise was founded mainly in listed building repair, where best conservation practice and SPAB philosophy often called for difficult scarf joints and resin repairs to retain as much of the physical historic material as possible. Prior to the genesis of the modern conservation ethos, many local houses and barns were poorly repaired and damaged by unsuitable materials such as concrete and cement. Fortunately, this is often reversible and TVHE are well practiced to be able to rectify such work according to best practise.
TVHE are equipped with a saw mill facility and cut much of our own timber which is sourced sustainably from locally managed estates wherever possible. We hold a large range of seasoned British timbers in stock, including large section air dried oak, ash, and hornbeam for wooden teeth. We are well equipped to cut and machine green timber to order and can also source specialist timbers for projects, having previously supplied greenheart, elm and opepe for use in and around water control sluices, dams and wheels. The local National trust estate at Bromyard are the main supplier of timber for both our millwrighting work and timber frame jobs, providing only the highest quality air dried timbers for repair works.
Emergency repairs
Stone dressing and setting up
Mill condition surveys and conservation plans
Feasibility studies, Health & Safety guidance and Risk Assessments
Repair works in both timber and iron
Sail removal (by crane and by hand)
Manufacture of patterns for castings
New parts manufactured and replicated, from cogs to sails
Machinery sourcing through rescue, removal and reinstallation
Programmes for regular maintenance
Bespoke new timber framing for historic buildings of all varieties
Timber frame repair, both cosmetic and structural, in a variety of seasoned and green timbers