KERF

Sheffield / S3

A face mill cutting an aluminium disc clamped in a machine vice, chips still on the table.

Tooling, jigs and small-batch runs, made in the same building as the drawings.

Est. 2011

A close, dark pile of cast steel fittings: threads, hexes and bores.

Industrial design for mechanisms, housings and hardware.

KERF WORKS. Industrial design from Sheffield.

Drag the seam. Give one side the room.

The studio

A kerf is the width a blade takes out of the work. Get it wrong and nothing fits.

KERF is six people in a converted cutlery works on Cornish Street. We draw, prototype and tool physical products — mechanisms, housings, hardware, the parts nobody photographs. Most of what we design is made within forty miles of the studio.

We take a job from sketch to a production pack a factory can quote from, and we stay on it through first-off inspection. There is no separate strategy department. The people who drew it sign it off.

  • 14years
  • 06people
  • 92products tooled

Selected work

DEALT FROM THE SEAM

  1. Two machined aluminium hub flanges resting on the general arrangement drawings they were cut from.

    Vane

    Hub flanges for a direct-drive turbine, held to 0.03mm on the bore and cut from billet on a three-day lead.

    2024 / Drivetrain

  2. Cast and machined aluminium pump housings photographed against white.

    Ondu

    A cast pump housing redrawn around the toolmaker’s draft angles, taking eleven parts out of the assembly.

    2023 / Fluid handling

  3. A dense wall of gears, bearings and machined components packed edge to edge.

    Meridian

    Forty years of legacy machine tools redrawn from the parts themselves, so spares can be quoted again.

    2022 / Machine tools

WHAT WE
ACTUALLY DO

  1. 01Product designConcept through to a signed production pack: GA drawings, tolerances, materials, finish schedule.
  2. 02Design for manufactureWe cost the part before we fall in love with it. Draft angles, nesting, weld access, the boring things.
  3. 03PrototypingIn-house: 3-axis mill, press brake, resin printer, a welder who tells us when we are wrong.
  4. 04Tooling liaisonWe speak to your toolmaker directly and stay on the job to first-off inspection.
  5. 05Small-batch runsUnder 500 units we can build it here rather than send it out. Useful for a launch you are not sure about.

Cornish Street

THE FLOOR

Drawing office at the front, machines at the back, one door between them. Nobody hands a drawing over a wall here; they carry it thirty feet and get told what is wrong with it.

  • Mon – Thu08:00 – 18:00
  • Friday08:00 – 14:00
  • VisitsBy arrangement

Unit 4, Cornish Works
Cornish Street
Sheffield S6 3AE

Start something

[email protected]

We answer briefs, not enquiries. Tell us what the thing is, roughly what it has to cost, and when it has to exist.

+44 114 270 0114
Unit 4, Cornish Works, Sheffield S6 3AE

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