The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Fay Berry 2013 © – Chapter 11

Memories of Maynard O’Connor & Sons Pty Ltd – Written by my brother, 24 June 1996. Continued.

My brother continues his story about his experience with our Dad and brother, Maynard and the blacksmith shop as it grew and moved its location over the years.

A feature of the Bowden factory was the addition of a Cylindrical Grinder which was used to create special stub axles for semi‑trailers for Freuhauf, and an internal grinder which was used in the production of hydraulic cylinders and other products.  An automatic copy lathe was part of this production line. Later a Blom Surface grinder was added but it was hard to obtain enough work to keep it going. Hydraulics also became a speciality of the company and they produced a Back‑hoe attachment to be mounted on a tractor. This involved the design and manufacture of two-speed hydraulics. This may not have been a new concept but it was not in common use. The principal was that a dual bore hydraulic cylinder would allow a powerful high speed stroke to end in a slower, cushioned accurate end stroke. A project to produce these items was started and to achieve the required result, several highly accurate Honing machines were made and sold. The Backhoe was capable of digging a trench at record speed but councils did not buy because unions did not want to work that fast. The whole project was eventually sold as a going concern, but the new owners had purchased the patents because Dad’s invention was competitive with their current major line.

One project in 1968 was the Maycoson Tool and Cutter grinding attachment. The first attachment was taken over from another firm and included a quantity of attachments which were all sold. Maynard then made his Mark II version of this which had multiple improvements and was completely manufactured in house but for the castings and ball bearings. A problem showed up in manufacture of the collets and Maynard Jr did not want to go ahead with the cost of a redesign. A number were sold and I was still getting sales enquires 25 years later. As part of that project, we needed to have a leaflet and an instruction manual for the machine. So we made our own. Maynard Jr built a Graphic Arts camera that could handle an 11″x14″ negative and a small typesetting machine to facilitate this production. Of course the next time I visited Maynard I found that he had established a printing company called “Value Graphics.” Maynard Jr rarely did things by half measure.

Valu-graphics, the office Maynard set up around the corner from the Maynard O’Connor and Son factory in Gibson Street, Bowden. Later Fay used this is an office to conduct her real estate business. This photo was taken many years later just prior to the council demolishing it to make way for new buildings in the upgrade of the Bowden area.

Forest Brinkerhoff

It was at this time that, Forest Brinkerhoff was in Australia from America and he was full of ideas gained while he lied in America. He talked to Maynard about the possibility of him designing and building a hydroponics machine. The concept of this machine was based on a U.S. idea which consisted of an insulated refrigerated cool room with grow lighting and an inbuilt watering system. The purpose was to sprout grains and grow plants where there was not a natural growing environment. The weakness of the American design was that of access. Sequential planting was required to allow part of the total crop to be planted daily and harvested when ready. It was considered that a walkway would be needed as the first planting would be furthest away from the door.

This is the only photo I can find of John Roper and wife Marian.

Forest and John Roper asked Maynard Jr to consider Forest’s description of American hydroponics and come up with a design to build an Australian version. Maynard decided to use two cylindrical corrugated rainwater tanks that could be assembled one inside of the other. These tanks were assembled and Poly Styrene foam insulation poured in the wall created by the tanks giving effective insulation. A tank bottom forming a conical reservoir was fitted to the inside tank and a strong top plate fitted above. A centre shaft passed up from the cone of the reservoir to the centre of the top plate and on each end was a bearing and wheel assembly. After the insulation was poured, a large door was cut through both tank shells and the insulation and a door frame was fitted plus hinges, door seals, trim and locks. Seven Lazy Susan frames were made to hang from the top and bottom bearing wheels, each frame being divided into seven levels. Around the centre column also, four eight foot long Sylvania Gro‑lux lamps were mounted and reached from the roof to just above the level of the reservoir. Around the wall of the tank a number of spray bars with nozzles were placed.  On top of the solid steel tank top, a fibre glass cupola was mounted, the cupola having a fold back weather proof lid.

On the deck under the cupola lid, a small refrigerator was installed and connected to a condenser and fan assembly inside the hydroponic tank. A small, timer actuated water pump was plumbed to the spray nozzles, sucking water up from the reservoir at the bottom of the tank shell. The water level in the reservoir was maintained by a ball and cock fed by a garden hose connection to the centre shaft, and an overflow stand pipe to drain any excess. The four fluorescent lamps could be retracted through the deck when the cupola lid was open for lamp replacement. Inside the growing compartment, in each level of the seven frames that made up the Lazy Susan assembly, two fibreglass frames sloped down towards the centre shaft, and small drain holes allowed the excess water to drip back to the reservoir during the spray cycle.

The optimum temperature maintained in the growing chamber was 65 degrees F. This allowed the grass to retain a high moisture content. The Lazy Susan concept allowed each day’s crop to be harvested by simply rotating the frame to the door space and removing the trays in the segment that had grown to the target maturity, washing the tray and re‑sowing.  The hydroponics machine could be transported to any location without damage and be crane slung by the centre shaft. Single phase domestic power was all that was required, or generator connection and a town water garden hose connection or daily hand filling of the reservoir.

To introduce the Hydroponic Machine, a Field Day was organised and held in the local area but Maynard Jr had become sick right about this time  and was unable to supervise the preparation for the Field Day. A disaster happened. Someone at the Field Day site left the door of the cool room open overnight the night before the presentation. The crop that the animals were gladly eating the day before, went sour in the heat and the animals refused to eat it. This and Maynard’s illness and overspending on the budget put an end to the hydroponics machine at that time.

The hydroponics machine. Such a shame Maynard got sick. Maynard was for most of his life bi-polar or “manic-depressive” as it used to be called. When he forgot, or refused to take his drugs, he became manic (never depressive) and was unable to function properly.

Maynard Jr then commenced on another project called Sway‑Allay.  Mum and Dad were involved in a caravanning accident caused by uncontrollable caravan sway when the wheels of their caravan got caught on a damaged road edge. They wiped out a line of guide posts and lost the caravan over the edge of the road. Maynard’s remedial research found that sway in a trailer is caused by compression of the leaf springs which deviated the wheel alignment of each side wheel or wheel set in turn. This set up a chain reaction of swerves to one side and then the other which if not immediately checked can result in the trailer swerving from one side of the road to the other. He designed the Sway‑Allay concept to separate the reaction of the near side wheel from the off side wheel by severing the axle in the centre of the trailer and fixing the loose end to a slide that kept each side wheel pointing perfectly along the line of travel. This gave full independent suspension to each wheel and wheel alignment screws maintained alignment with the axis of the caravan. This completely eliminated sway.

Dad was getting older and wanted to retire and so Maynard took over the business, with his son Ronald, later his Sons in Law and much later his younger son Michael. Dad sold the Ship’s Chandlery side of the business and its designs to Nobles factory. They purchased on the condition that Dad come and work for them and manage this new side to their business. Dad worked for Nobles using his lifetime of skills for their benefit. They sent him on trips interstate to sell their products. He remained working for Nobles’ for a number of years, but he still came to Maynard’s aid in any special projects and helped him whenever possible.

Maynard O’Connor, our Dad

Maynard moved the business to Summertown in the Adelaide Hills near Mt Lofty. Maynard carried on his interest in the Wool Industry. He had made acumulator conveyors that speeded up the Wool Dumping Presses in various locations and then had a successful design involvement in the Bulk unloading from rail cars of wool bales. His design to remove 24 bales at once from rail cars was brilliant. At Summertown, in about June 1981 he commenced building his first Core Sampling machines. He was working in a factory he had built on Samwell’s land at Somertown and had completed the prototype for his first Core Sampling machine. Maynard Jr’s factory had two large petrol tanks beside the front door of his shed.

That year there was a huge bushfire which swept through the area. The petrol tanks exploded and his factory was completely demolished. Maynard did not have insurance on his factory building because it was on private property and friend’s property at that. That would have put Maynard completely out of business except for the generosity of many Christadelphians who helped Maynard Jr financially and he was soon back in business, this time at Golden Grove. In May 1984 he built a  60’ x 60’ shed with a 25 foot high roof on his new property. One of his wool coring machines had been off-site during the fire at Somertown and he also had kept all his plans and drawings off-site. After the fire, the Samwell family, who owned the property where Maynard’s factory had been located, moved their sprout growing business to Mt Barker and they are still there today.

Kent Samwell, sprout growers, and cabbages by he look of it.

Maynard had to move his business yet again. His factory was very noisy and all sounds were magnified. He used a lot of money on sound insulation. He decided to move to Freeling and build a “perfect” factory this time and a large house and a beautiful indoor swimming pool. Ronald, Maynard’s son, excelled in machine shop design work and planning and production turning. The business continued with the production of a further eight core machines.   Maynard’s Quickturn lathe which was destroyed in the fire resulted in a change of direction in production methods. Production was now to be based around the use of an automatic Oxy Profile Cutter which resulted in better stronger more reliable designs. Ronald was kept busy with trips to Melbourne and Brisbane to install machines.

Dad, ever the inventor, in July, at my request motorized his boat trailer. I was concerned that he might, by constantly lifting and turning the boat out of the water, eventually “burst” something. Dad gathered together from wherever, a car back axle, diff, tail shaft and gearbox, building it all into his trailer. He mounted a lawnmower engine with a V belt drive to the gearbox. The V belt slipped to act as a clutch and a full size car wheel acted as a jockey wheel which was steered by a lever with a throttle control on it. The idea of all of this was to avoid taking the car down to the beach. The boat and trailer self-propelled from the car park to the beach and the same on the way back to the car park.

Dad with his automated boat trailer that enabled him to manage his boat right up until the day he died.

Maynard moved his factory once again, in February 1985, to the Elders’ Store near Port Adelaide where he produced single and multicore machines and the first two-headed grab machines.

Maynard’s House and swimming pool area at Freeling. The factory is further over left of this picture.

This factory proved to be too small and so finally, Maynard moved the business one last time to Freeling on the edge of the Barossa valley where he built a family home and a modern factory. The two sons in-law, Kevin Fergusson and Graeme Smith became involved in the business, Graeme in electrical wiring and computer programming and Kevin in project management and computer assembly.  Ronald, Kevin, Graeme and James worked hard to set up the factory and to lay everything out in the best way possible. Ronald set up the garden and the roads and fences in his “spare” time and the machine shop in between times. When they first became involved in automatic core sampling, a purpose built computer had been designed for them. This computer, had multiple I/O devices, and had a capacity not equal to the increasing demands of machine design. I had a friend called Axle and he became involved in the computer by firstly writing a parasitic language that would function inside of the existing computer program and increase its capacity sufficiently to perform the required tasks. This too, soon became redundant and Axle set about the complete design of a replacement system to carry on production. These were manufactured in house. The design was to include gradual expansion to enable real time contact with wool company mainframe computers.

In the middle of all this Maynard was asked to repair and upgrade a supposedly “automatic” grabbing, weighing and coring line “capable of a 1000 bale a day throughput” which had been manufactured by “Jetco” in the Yennora Dalgety store. Maynard did not want the job but they insisted because they said they knew of noone else capable of doing the job. Maynard started a design and Ronald pre-built the parts in Adelaide and came across to fit them. The whole thing was run by a Festo Plc which Dalgetty’s wanted to retain and which had to be expanded to more than double the capacity to run. Ronald and I had the job of tracing all of the functions of the I/O lines on the machine and I had to rewire it to handle all of the new functions. It took forever for Festo to program and Axle had to come and bail them out. It then needed a Wooltech Computer to instruct the Festo Computer and Graeme to program that due to the limits on programming features of the Festo Computer. I believe it is all still working with a good throughput of bales.

It was planned to develop the Axle computer during construction of the second and third Wooltech Bale Sortation Systems for Dalgetys. The sortation system was built to sort the incoming wool clip bales on arrival at the central wool store. The sortation line weighed each bale and oriented it automatically with the closures all facing the same way and the identifying mark facing up. This involved group placement on an accumulator conveyor, automatic turning and tumbling the bales on the conveyor line, weighing and identifying each bale then pushing each group of bales off on multiple pre-determined lines for fork trucks to assemble in groups and to place in the “stack” in locations that complied with the classer’s mark on each bale. The whole Sortation line can be handled by one operator and the in and out fork truck drivers. Prior to Maynard’s invention, bales were previously oriented by hand and needed multiple handling on a large floor space. The system worked well.

Sadly both Maynard Senior and Maynard Junior and my Mum have since died, but the business continues on and Dad and Maynard are very much alive in my mind and my memory. Written by the youngest O’Connor brother, July 1996.