Basic costs

The Science Faculty workshops have gradually evolved into a service that extends beyond the Faculty boundaries. Therefore, the workshops are now available as a University-wide service. Anyone in the University can access the workshops for research and teaching-related support.

The costs of the service breakdown as:

• All projects must pay for their consumables - this is the materials need for the project and any specialist tools or tool components needed for the work
• Work deemed economically unviable will be rejected by the workshop manager or supervisors
• Projects from the Faculty of Engineering will be charged a £40 hourly labour charge, in a reciprocal arrangement
• There is an expectation that manufacturing hours are recovered on grants as Directly allocated costs (see below)
• Where work is commercial, for spinouts and startups etc, we have to charged commercial rates (see below)

Adding workshop time to grants

Significant workshop time spent on manufacturing projects for grants should be covered by directly allocated costs on the supporting grant. If you know a project will require more than a month's workshop manufacturing time, please discuss the project with the workshop manager or supervisors during preparation of the grant. They will provide an estimate of the hours needed and the grade of technician you will need to include in the FEC tool.

Commercial work

We are not a commercial workshop service and therefore commercial work is not our focus and is accepted only by exception. All work for a commercial entity will be charged at commercial rates. This allows us to recover the full costs associated with the work (materials, labour, space costs, depreciation etc) and then to benefit from doing work outside of our core activity.

If the commercial entity comes from University activity, exceptions to commercial charging would only occur if they were built into any contractual agreement with the University, as part of acknowledged support.