Lancashire-made dragon heads for the far east (and we don’t mean Yorkshire!)

Citation

(2006), "Lancashire-made dragon heads for the far east (and we don’t mean Yorkshire!)", Anti-Corrosion Methods and Materials, Vol. 53 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/acmm.2006.12853cab.013

Lancashire-made dragon heads for the far east (and we don’t mean Yorkshire!)

Lancashire-made dragon heads for the far east (and we don’t mean Yorkshire!)

When a traditional wedding chapel in Japan needed a spectacular, bespoke-designed and hand-crafted dragon to decorate its premises, it turned to the obvious place to acquire one – Lancashire.

The 12 ft long steel dragon, with a 5 ft 6 in. wingspan, and manufactured by Burnley-based wrought ironwork specialists B. Rourke & Company Ltd, is one of the more unusual galvanizing jobs successfully completed recently by Wedge Group company, Pillar-Wedge Ltd of Heywood.

Danny Flynn, Sales Manager of Pillar-Wedge Ltd, said: “Our customer produces a lot of decorative forged ironwork, including gates and railings which we have galvanized in the past, but this dragon was really a bit different from our usual work. We had a meeting to discuss the right way to get the very best result, because the sculpture has a lot of complicated shapes and profiles. In the end, we were able to carry out the galvanizing with a single dipping.”

B. Rourke & Company Ltd, which was set-up 45 years ago, is one of the world’s leading experts in its field, and has exported decorative gates, railings, components and bespoke one-off designs to over 30 countries. When it received the order for the dragon, the company decided to manufacture two, each weighing around 140 kg – the second sculpture standing proudly outside the company’s site at Burnley (Plate 4).

Plate 4

Pillar-Wedge Ltd’s facilities, including its modern, fully-enclosed galvanizing bath, measuring 10.2 × 1.52 × 3.2 m, meet the latest and most stringent European and UK environment-protection regulations.