Read about Lucy the Engineer | Geezerbird Gear

Lucy For as long as Lucy can remember she’s been fascinated by how things work and didn’t mind getting grubby to find out! Never one for doing as she was told, she opted for Metalwork in preference to ‘Fashion & Fabrics’ at high school, and after making a steam turbine out of a Golden Syrup tin Lucy decided that engineering was going to be her chosen career.

Being the only girl in an Engineering Technology class full of teenage boys had its moments though. Some of them would get extremely personal with their observations and comments and Lucy’s philosophy since then has been “If I can survive that I can survive anything!”

During ‘A’ level studies, Lucy stayed for a week at Sheffield University with 30 other girls to find out about the careers and further education opportunities available through the ‘Women in Science and Engineering (WISE)’ project. She tried out different engineering disciplines including thermodynamics, structures and metallurgy, and was inspired by her visit to Sheffield Forgemasters to see engineering applied in an industrial environment.

‘A’ levels didn't go quite to plan (too much maths and physics, not enough engineering), but at the eleventh hour Lucy managed to get into Leicester Polytechnic to study for a degree in Engineering Technology. This worked out well, as she’d already found a sponsorship with a local textile machine manufacturer, getting valuable work experience in the holidays in all areas of the company from heat treatment to paint spraying and production engineering to design.

Following graduation and the end of her sponsorship period, Lucy started work as a Technical Sales Engineer with another local company, this time making overhead conveyors for garment warehousing, spray booths and abattoirs, but a rapid downturn in work led to redundancy after only 18 months, and a new job at GEC.

Inside the Sellafield Swarf Retrieval machine On her first day at work as a Manufacturing Engineer, Lucy was given a stack of 500 drawings and a pile of 5000 parts, and told to work out how they all went together. She found she was responsible for supervising a team of fitters and making sure all the parts and assemblies were inspected, tested and fully traceable. This 4 year project for the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield was great for Lucy as she was able to take control of the whole process from start to finish, turning a pile of parts into a machine and then making it work.

Quarry Grading Screen in manufacture However, when asking for some career development (thinking here of management opportunities) she was allocated a year in Purchasing, a year in Stores and a year in Production Control. This was not her idea of ‘career development’ so, having done only 6 months in Purchasing, she left for a Senior Manufacturing Engineer’s job producing base stations for mobile phone masts.

Her first task in her new position was to reorganise the complex manufacturing areas to streamline the production process, involving the movement of large heavy pieces of equipment around in a very small area without disrupting productivity – or more importantly without squashing anyone!

Having been promised management opportunities within this company it was frustrating to find that these didn’t actually exist – until after about 3 years when, out of the blue, a place was available on a Risk Assessment course and Lucy was asked to go on it so the training fee wouldn’t be wasted.

This sparked her interest in health and safety and led after 12 months to her appointment as Health & Safety Officer overseeing the entire manufacturing facility of around 400 people. Her boss arranged all the training she needed to enable her to carry out the job effectively and she soon progressed to Health, Safety & Environmental Manager. This was a great learning opportunity for Lucy - there were very few formal procedures in place and she could start with a clean slate.

The most challenging obstacle throughout this period was the non-cooperation of the middle management - Lucy always says that the only ‘PMT’ she ever suffered from stood for ‘Permanent Manager Trouble’!

As the mobile phone industry slumped in the early 2000s and the company effectively shut down, Lucy was again out of a job in July 2002. She decided to set up her own business as an H&S Advisor for small- and medium-sized local companies. With some grant funding and business start-up training through the Government’s ‘New Deal’ programme and Business Link, she officially set up her own business in October 2002.

To keep food on the table whilst trying to find clients, Lucy took on anything that came along - mostly decorating for friends and labouring for a sign fitter.

Five years on, the business has grown well and Lucy finds most of her work now comes through word of mouth from satisfied customers. She hasn’t looked back since and gets a great deal of job satisfaction from working with a variety of clients from firewalkers to spring makers to thermal underwear manufacturers to engineers.

Geezerbird Gear t shirts followed in 2005 - you can read all about that on our ‘About Geezerbird Gear’ page.

But it’s not (quite) all work and no play. In her spare time, Lucy enjoys pumping iron at the local gym, kung-fu and reading. This year she’s growing her own fruit and veg to reduce the ‘food miles’ travelled to about 20 feet – at least for the spinach, beetroot, tomatoes and figs!

BSA 1940 WD M20 - the "Flying Haemorrhoid" Having always loved classic British motorbikes, Lucy has recently bought a 1949 BSA A7 and a War Department BSA M20 from 1940 which just need a little TLC to get them on the road again for this year.

If you’d like to catch up on Lucy’s more personal thoughts, you can read her MySpace blog.