Gavin Bateman

MECHANICAL ENGINEER

Skills Overview

Gavin Bateman is an experienced and results-driven mechanical engineer with a proven track record of spearheading design, development and project initiatives across diverse industry sectors ranging from furniture design to chocolate plant design. With a keen focus on efficiency and quality, Gavin excels in optimising engineering designs and project workflows to deliver innovative solutions that exceed expectations.

MACHINERY & EQUIPMENT DESIGN – Gavin has extensive experience in designing and manufacture of machinery and equipment, including systems integrating 6-axis robots, material handling solutions, robot palletising, conveyors, bespoke equipment for fish processing, and chocolate manufacturing. He has also designed and built test rigs for ensuring products meet relevant international standards.
CAD DESIGN – Gavin has been a long time user of SolidWorks and AutoCAD, creating robust CAD models, assemblies and drawings and regularly contributes to peer review of drawings and designs. Recently he has been introducing clients to the time and cost savings provided by the use of digital manufacturing methods.
DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURE/ASSEMBLY – Due to his background in both workshop and factory environments, Gavin is acutely aware of the challenges and pitfalls of bringing designs to life and places a lot of importance on the need to not only design with this in mind but also integrate the feedback of those producing the design.
PROJECT ENGINEERING/MANAGEMENT – Gavin has experience as a project engineer in the manufacturing and facility arenas, where he has worked on projects of varying complexity with rigid deadlines, environmental constraints and multiple sub contractors to coordinate. He successfully managed a $10m machine install and manufacturing upgrade at Whittakers which was completed a week ahead of schedule and allowed an extra $1m in revenue.
RAPID PROTOTYPING & DIGITAL MANUFACTURING – Gavin regularly uses 3D printing, CNC, laser, and water cutters and more to create works-like and looks-like prototypes, as well as production components where the design or volumes dictate it to be an ideal solution.
FABRICATION & MACHINING – Having trained as a toolmaker Gavin is familiar with what can be achieved with generally available workshop equipment and is capable of using the equipment to facilitate the rapid turnaround of concept models and mechanisms.

Caliber has experience in the Agriculture industry

Caliber has experience in the Aerospace industry

Caliber Design has experience in the Biofuel industry

PERSONAL STATEMENT

I’m a mechanical engineer who loves to see my designs progress from a concept through to a product that is performs its function well.

I have been interested in things mechanical from a young age when handing tools to my father and grandfather as they worked on our family cars. This developed over time to building my own cars from scratch doing as much of the work as possible myself.

Outside of work I can be found doing something with my kids or in the workshop making something.

Project Experience

WHITTAKERS

3rd Conche Installation

Designed the installation of a 3rd Conching machine to go in line with the existing 2 machines. Using the CAD model of the machine supplied by the manufacturer, Gavin measured the current installation and modelled all the required services including new steam generators, cooling towers, ingredient feed lines, product takeaway lines, gas, power conduits etc, and had them preinstalled by the time the unit arrived. This required coordinating with production to build enough stock to cover when the lines would be unavailable, setting up clean zones, coordinating all sub contractors, dealing with power authority to get line upgrades etc.

CARSOE US

Automatic Salmon Heading & Gutting Machine

The task was to redesign and manufacture a previously manufactured machine to utlilise modern sensor technology, manufacturing methods, reduce the footprint and create assembly drawings, parts manuals, and service manuals. This ended up with over 2000 new parts and was completed in the space of 4 months when the customer had 300T of frozen salmon arriving to process.

PEEK ROBOTICS

Grover

Taking the existing 4th Gen AUV robot that had been developed to a point where it was mostly reliable and redesigning it to be more robust, a lot easier to manufacture and faster to service. This was done by both applying DFM / DFA principles and modularisation of the design. Build time came down from over 2 weeks per unit to 2 days. Time to change a wheel reduced from 2 hours to 4 minutes. Full assembly drawings were created so that anyone in the company could build a robot.

AMAZON GLOBAL ENGINEERING SERVICES

Damage Reduction Project

Amazon sort centres in USA were spending $250m per year on concessions caused by damaged goods in sort centers. Gavin spent 2 months scouring data and finding the worst culprits. On site he made a $1m improvement without the need for additional funding by changing maintenance procedures. A further $26m was found by analysing where data was captured and relocating this point . He initiated several other improvements that were longer term fixes also.