An engineering works built on repeat work

The company

Medium-sized on purpose

Large enough to hold real capability in-house. Small enough that the person quoting your job is the person who will answer the phone when you ring about it.

Van Driel Engineering Ltd was incorporated in England and Wales in 1996 (company number 03291328) and has traded from Roudham Road, East Harling, ever since. The business is owner-managed on site, and the workforce is directly employed: welder/fabricators, machinists, directors and office staff, with no reliance on agency labour for production work.

The principal business is the design and fabrication of products made to customer specification, for both commercial and domestic customers. A CNC machine shop supports that fabrication work and is also available as a standalone service, so a customer needing only turned or milled components can use it without buying a fabrication package around it.

Alongside that, engineering judgement is offered as work in its own right. Customers who have a requirement rather than a drawing engage us for engineering consultancy, requirement review, technical assessment and design development, and can then take the outcome into manufacture here without it changing hands.

The engineering side of that is led by a Chartered Engineer, and the production side by the person who has to make the result. See engineering leadership for who they are and how the two halves fit together.

If you want to work here rather than buy from here, the careers page sets out what we look for and how to apply.

Where we sit

East Harling is in south Norfolk, with road links to London and the South East via the M11 and M25, and north via the A14. That geography matters more than it sounds: it puts the works within a comfortable day's return delivery of most of the East of England, the East Midlands and Greater London.

Profiling capacity that a works of this size could not justify on its own is reached through the group rather than bought on the open market. See Location for how to find us, and laser cutting for that capability.

Standard of work

The phrase used inside the business is “right first time”. It is not a slogan so much as an economic position: rework on a fabricated assembly is rarely cheap, and on a safety-related product it is not acceptable at all. Wheelchair access ramps for public transport are quality-checked twice before despatch. Stainless staircases are built to a finish specification that will survive the environment they are going into, not just the photograph.

We hold no third-party quality accreditation, and we would rather say so than imply one. What is here instead is a directly employed workforce, engineers who see the job from enquiry to despatch, and work inspected against the drawing it was quoted to by the people who made it. Where a contract requires a documented inspection or certification regime, tell us at enquiry: it is a scope question, it is priceable, and it is better raised before the quotation than after the delivery.

Ownership

Van Driel Engineering is part of a wider UK engineering group held under long-term, permanent ownership rather than private equity. The group operates on a decentralised model: each company keeps its own name, its own leadership and its own customer relationships. In practice that means the people you deal with do not change, and investment decisions are made against a decade, not an exit.