Franco Albini Retires After 43 Years at Timsons

Franco Albini retired from Timsons on 22 October 2026. He joined the company in 1983 and spent the next 43 years at the Kettering works — long enough to see presses he worked on go out to printers around the world, and in a good many cases to see them still running decades later.

The workforce gathered in the machine shop to see him off, and Giovanni Piazza, Managing Director of Timsons, thanked him on behalf of the company.

“Forty-three years is a working lifetime,” said Giovanni. “Franco has been part of this works for longer than most of us have been in the industry. The quality Timsons is known for is built by people like him, one job at a time, and we are grateful for every one of those years. We wish him a long and happy retirement.”

1983 to 2026

Presses have been engineered in Kettering since 1896, and Franco has been there for a third of that history. When he started, the works was building presses for a book trade that still pasted up its pages by hand; he leaves it building the T48A ZMR for printers who change plates without stopping the press. The machines changed around him. The standard he worked to did not.

Forty-three years is not a figure anyone sets out to reach. It accumulates: one shift, one job, one problem worked out at the machine, repeated until the total is large enough to stop for.

The next 43 years

Six apprentices started at the works in September, the first intake in more than fifteen years. Some of them will have spent their first weeks working alongside Franco. That is how a works like this carries on: the people who built its reputation hand the job to the people who will keep it.

Everyone at Timsons thanks Franco for 43 years and wishes him a long, happy and well-earned retirement.