Leak Logo A Visit to the Leak Factory
April 1968		  

If it was 1968, you could visit the Leak factory in Brunel Road, West London, see the operations of the company, and meet senior staff. In April 1968, a group of students from Sweden did just that. They were interested in Hi-Fi, and as part of there studies at a technical college, they visited Leak to learn more.

One of these students, Roger Berg from Sweden, has generously provided us with a record of his visit. So here is how it was.....

(You can also see these and other photo's of Roger Berg's trip from Sweden to London in 1968 at http://medlem.spray.se/rogerico/London1968.)

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. You can see a map of Brunel Road here - the Leak premises were at the left (west) end of Brunel Road
on the south side (near the railway footbridge). Here is a current aerial photo of the Brunel Road site -
the Leak premises have been replaced with a silver coloured building. p>

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Simon Leak (son of Harold) recalls his time at the factory:

"I knew absolutely nothing at all about the way electronics functioned, but an experiment was established to see if a non-technical person could cope with the testing of Stereo 30s and Troughlines. The reason was that due to huge demand and a lack of qualified staff, the Ealing factory was piled high (literally) with untested goods.

"I'd just left school with no idea as to what to do with life and so my father dragged me into the factory where, within a few weeks, I was churning out more tested sets than anyone else (with a lot of help from Ray Whitcombe's easy to follow written instructions). Then, if there was a fault that could not be detected, the rule was to 1) Drop the piece of equipment from six inches high on to the rubber mat to see if it would shake the problem loose, 2) Call in an expert!

"Within a couple of months the backlog was cleared! Regarding the soldering irons - there was nowhere to hang them and I was always burning myself plus getting 'belts' from the equipment that would send your arm in to a temporary spasm!

- Simon Leak, 2003.

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"The alignment of the Trough-Line Stereo was very critical. It was found that the stereo performance was very dependent on the linearity of the discriminators's "S-curve". Initially the Lab did a final "tweak" using a distortion factor meter, having first obtained the best visual alignment with a sweep generator. This method was unacceptable for production units, so Bob Skegg and I were given permission to build some special test gear for use on the production line. The design was based on frequency modulating a radio-frequency carrier with a 1kHz sine wave that had been mixed with a three-position staircase waveform. This was f ed to the tuner under test, and the tuner's audio output measured through a 2kHz band-pass filter. The output from this filter was the second-harmonic distortion at three different deviations of the radio frequency carrier. Displayed on an oscilloscope, the objective was to align the tuner so that the centre burst (at nominal carrier frequency) was as small as possible, consistent with the outer bursts being equal."

-- Ray Whitcombe, Design Engineer, H.J.Leak & Co. Ltd

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The Greystoke pub is located at 7 Queens Parade, Hanger Lane, Ealing, London, W5 3HU.
You can see a location map here for The Greystoke. It is about 2.5km west of the Leak factory,
which is located at the end of Brunel road - see map here.

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H. J. LEAK & CO. LTD.

Designers and Manufacturers of Specialised Electronic Instruments for the Communications Industries

BRUNEL ROAD * WESTWAY FACTORY ESTATE * LONDON, W3