Frank Rothwell looks out over a vast Oldham landscape just beneath Pots and Pans, reaching down to a bucket of fish food and filling a mugful to scatter into his pond for the hungry hoards.

He has worked abroad, sailed around the world, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and twice rowed the Atlantic Ocean for charity, but nowhere is he happier than here. Home.

"It's beautiful isn't it," said Frank, who with wife Judith has been soaking up the scenery there for the last 25 years.

And it is where Darren Royle first set the wheels in motion for the family's takeover of Oldham Athletic with a chance knock on their kitchen door two years ago.

At the time his intention was to seek the businessman's counsel on getting a consortium together. But the conversation soon went down the path of a Rothwell family project and the rest, as they say, is history.

Frank was supposed to be enjoying retirement, after stepping back from the day to day running of Manchester Cabins and Bunkabin and handing over to his children, Luke Rothwell and Su Schofield. Having embraced the football club and his role as chairman, he says he has never been busier.

But Frank is never not busy. He is dressed in his overalls when I arrive, working on his latest project - a Kiichiro Rothwell, named after Kiichiro Toyoda, the son of Toyota Industries founder Sakichi Toyoda.

Toyota moved into the motor industry when Kiichiro was invited to England by the Platt Brothers, who owned and operated a host of Oldham mills and bought the patent for the Toyoda Model G Loom, which allowed a single worker to operate up to 30 machines and significantly increased productivity, while the £100,000 generated from the sale was used by Kiichiro to start the Toyota Motor Corporation. Establishing RRG - one of the biggest motor dealer groups in the north of England - as the first shirt sponsor post-takeover felt symbolic.

We walk through Frank's workshop, where he is making the replica Toyota parts. The smell of materials and machinery transports me back in time to my metalwork classes at high school.

He shows me the Land Rover he adapted himself to become steam powered. The only one in the world, he assures me.

He is in his element here.

He takes a break and makes a cup of tea. Kettle not quite boiled, teabag soaked for only a few seconds, scooped out, no milk, job done. He doesn't muck about.

But when it comes to Oldham Athletic he has a much more patient and methodical approach.

"If you are struggling in a business you've got to get out of the situation you're in and first of all you've got to survive, and it's the same with the football," he said. "We had to make sure we weren't on a downward spiral and got relegated again.

"Once you survive you've got to consolidate and once you've done that, that's where we are this year now in hindsight, then you can look at expansion, and football expansion is promotion. So it's really important to Oldham Athletic that we get promoted.

"We want to be able to re-open the academy as an EPPP Academy."

For now, though, they are working with a re-modelled version, for 16 to 18-year-olds.

"We're offering a BTech course which looks like it's going from strength to strength," he said.

"The fact that we've got a girls' BTech course as well is absolutely brilliant. We've got enough to have a full team already, and we're really excited about that."

More generally speaking there are plans afoot for the ground; a long-term vision that will not come to fruition overnight but one that, he assures me, will be brilliant for Oldham. It has yet to be finalised so he is not at liberty to divulge more than that. But it is one that he is passionate about, not least because it will have wide-reaching benefits beyond football, and bring more people to Boundary Park.

Providing for the community of Oldham, and attracting more of that community to OL1, are things that Frank is self-driven to do.

"It's an opportunity to give Oldham some good press and make Oldham a better place, and that's what I want to do. I want to get the communities of Oldham together, and one of the ways to break down barriers is through cricket," he explained.

"Oldham Council granted us a £1million playing surface, which allows us to play rugby on there and football and I thought 'why can't we play cricket as well?'.

"So on May Bank Holiday Monday we held cricket matches between men's teams for England, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, and it was a success.

"There was a women's match too between Werneth and Greenfield and in the morning we had a junior tournament for under 11s, eight teams with four games running at once on the pitch and that was really successful. So depending on the football fixtures around the August Bank Holiday we'll do it again."

By then the 2024/25 season will be under way; a third season outside of the Football League. The desire to return is as strong as ever and the Rothwell family continue to explore ways to support that challenge.

"The infrastructure... I hope everyone can see the changes," said Frank.

"Our losses will be even more this year without the payments from the Football League and Premier League, which is a pain.

"But we want to make the club fully sustainable and not rely on just football to do that. That's our route through.

"It's a long-term project. I wish it was a short-term project but it's not."

Itching to get back to his workshop, the Latics chairman will not shy away from the hard work and the hard yards.