In 1951, Duncan Bate set up a small engineering shop on the Newell Highway between Sydney and Melbourne, in the heart of the Murray irrigation country. The duty was simple: build pumps and valves heavy enough to survive the channels they would be installed in, with a parts file kept long enough to outlive their first thirty-year service interval.
Three-quarters of a century later, we are still on the same site. The company is still family-led. The lathes are CNC now and the drawings are vector files, but the bench against which the work is measured has not moved. We still measure runout to a thousandth of an inch, still expect a packing gland to be repacked rather than replaced, and still keep the file open on every pump that leaves the shed.
In that file are 7,500 pumps. Our oldest running unit, pump number six, was installed in 1952 and is still in service. A 9/11 axial-flow pump installed in 1958 came in for its first service in January 2019 — sixty-one years of continuous duty. It is not uncommon for pumps to come into the workshop after thirty years of service: the owner may have changed hands, the paint has flaked off and corrosion at the waterline has occurred, but the pump still runs as well as the day it was installed.
The same archive serves operators of pumps no longer supported by their original manufacturers — Ornell, Lane & Bowler, Hoxton, Pomona, Weir, Everflow, Flygt — and continues to serve them.
The pumps have travelled. They sit in irrigation districts across Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia; in plantations in Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Sri Lanka; in the United States and China; in the copper belt of Zambia; and in every state of Australia. The shopfront is still on the Newell Highway, the phone is still answered by a person, and the parts are still on the shelf.
If your pump has been in service for thirty years, it is not because nothing went wrong. It is because someone, somewhere, kept the drawings.
Casting
Machining
AssemblyA pump is not a sealed unit. Designs allow vertical dismantling, accessible packing glands, replaceable shafts and standardised flanges. If the pump cannot be serviced, it has been wrongly designed.
Every unit gets a file. The drawings, materials, modifications and signed test report stay with the serial number for as long as the pump is in service. We have files for pumps shipped before colour television.
The phone at the factory is picked up by a person — Sharon at the front desk, or an engineer at the bench. Sales and technical conversations are not routed through call centres. They are had in Tocumwal.
Duncan Bate, OAM — recognised by the Order of Australia Medal for his contribution to engineering and rural industry.
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