Founded in 1934 as the Leytonstone Jig & Tool Co. Ltd., Leytool Ltd had a three-acre main factory and drawing office at their Leytool Works at 606 High Road, Leyton, London E.10. There was also a 2-acre subsidiary plant, opened in 1948, on the Hollinbury Industrial Estate near Brighton, in Sussex - this being demolished in January 1985. A previous war-time "shadow" factory had also been constructed at Brighton, one of the many essential things they made being the tooling to construct parts of the Horsa gliders used for the 1944 D-day invasion.
Although known to the general public only for their hand tools made in the Hollinbury factory - especially a small but sturdy and popular hand-cranked drill (the writer has one, and uses it to this day) various socket sets and snail-cam and integral ratchet-action spanners - the Company was a more serious concern. Amongst their other activities, they were a well-established and successful designer and manufacturer of jigs, fixtures, test and welding rigs and precision tooling for the aircraft, automotive and machine tool industries.
While the Leytool factories were modest in size, they were well equipped, with departments for design, turning, grinding, heat-treatment and welding, jig boring and milling, shaping and capstan lathe and production work. A design and development department was run to handle customer requests and deal with one-off requests and the firm's inspection department was approved by the Aeronautical Inspection Directorate.
Machine tools installed in the works included the expected Cincinnati milling machines and Willson, LeBlond, Churchill Redman, Southbend, and Colchester lathe and also several high-class toolroom versions from Holbrook and CVA, Swiss-made SIP jig borers, a Brown and Sharpe "Omniversal" multi-function miller, Webster & Bennett vertical turning and boring lathes and Hilger & Watts optical inspection projectors.
Although not a maker of machine-tools, when the Company operated as the Leytonstone Jig & Tool Co. Ltd., they did offer a little 2-inch stroke slotting machine, this eventually being built in two models. In its original form, the slotter was intended for use in-house where it replaced a complex machining operation on one of their hand tools and increased output by some 25%. Recognising the possibilities of the machine, the decision was taken to manufacture it, the first type being the Mk.1 Tool Room, this being fitted, as standard, with a well-made, 7-inch diameter, hardened, ground and specially calibrated rotary table. The makers claimed a setting accuracy of within 0.001", the table being mounted on a screw-feed compound slide-rest assembly. Power feed was applied to both the slides and the rotary table through bevel gearing, the motion being cam-controlled from the main drive shaft to ensure that the motion was kept in precise relation to the position of the ram.
Table travel left-to-right was 6.5 inches, back-to-front 6.25 inches and with a feed to the table of 0.0025" per stroke of the ram. The ram head could be swivelled through 10° each side of central, adjusted for a starting point on its slideway through a travel of 7.25 inches and the ram stroke adjusted from 0 to 2 inches of travel. The maximum stroke rate was 304 per minute, this being equal to a tool-feed rate of 50 feet per minute at the 1-inch stroke setting. Weighing 5 cwt (0.25 tons) Carried on a cast-iron base the main drive incorporated Hoffman ball races with shafts running in oil-impregnated (Oilite) bushes.
Deciding that a less-expensive version would sell, a simplified Mk.2 model, the Workshop, was offered. Identical in general form to the Mk.1, the rotary table was omitted and the T-slotted compound table fitted with hand-feed only - the result being a slight reduction to 6.375 inches in the left-to-right travel and a small increase to 6.375 inches for the back-to-front. In all other respects, the Workshop was identical with exactly the same speeds and stroke and rates of table travels..