Brixham company J Reid Scallop Gear has come up with a new type of teeth for its scallop toothbars that have lasted three times longer than standard teeth during trials in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Jonathan Reid said that the new teeth were quietly introduced at the end of last year with some of his customers in Northern Ireland and Scotland trialling them. He said that boats using five dredges each side have found the new teeth last as much as three times longer, reducing downtime as there is less need to stop fishing to replace worn toothbars.
He commented that the key to the longer life is the grade of steel used in the teeth, which he identified through a chance contact in the mining industry.
‘So far we can only get them made in Spain, but we’re looking at bringing in machinery to do it here instead, and we now have to order these in bulk to ensure that we have them in stock when they are needed. But we’d prefer to be able to do it here, like everything else we do. If it’s made here then we have control over the quality all the way through,’ he said.
‘We have a few 24 metre boats trying them out now and we’ll see how long they last. I’m not sure it’ll be three times as long, but it’ll definitely be longer than the standard teeth.’
Another innovation is a hinge for scallop dredges that has been redesigned, placing the pad on the hinge itself rather than on the dredge.
‘This way they can just change the hinge instead of having to weld it up, which saves them time at sea. I’ll probably lose some refurbishment work, but it’s more important to have happy customers – and anything they don’t have to weld at sea is going to be better,” he said.
Alongside the scalloping hardware that Jonathan Reid supplies all over the UK and Ireland, as well as to France via Morgère, the company’s chandlery business has also been taking off, with both walk-in and online sales growing. Items ordered online before 2PM tend to be dispatched the same day, any later and dispatch is the following day.
‘We’re getting plenty of orders from remote places, with a lot of boots, gloves, oilskins, shackles and blocks are supplied that way,’ Jonathan Reid said.
‘We keep fifty or sixty different sizes of blocks in stock here and we keep a big stock because I don’t believe in selling something that’s not available from stock.’
