Thread: Interesting Old Equipment, Projects & Work Places

Originally Posted by Hogarthde

The 60’s must have been an exciting period; the Snowy going well , Savage River starting, timber mills being constructed , the Ord Scheme, millions of acres at Esperance to agriculture,
big old stations carved up for closer settlement, Bob Menzies holding the reins with a steady hand, with the EEC a few years away,.........and of course the lure for young men to see the world on government issue wages.

dave

Not forgetting to mention also at that time, GMH were rocketing out hundreds of Holden vehicles from the Elizabeth Plant each day. For sure, in those years there was real excitement in the air. The air actually smelt different as well. Maybe it was all the industry doing their stuff? Maybe it was the Maralinga Bomb Tests & Woomera Rocket Range.


Yep it was all happening alright & in a good way.


Doesn't smell like that anymore unfortunately.

Originally Posted by 4bee

Not forgetting to mention also at that time, GMH were rocketing out hundreds of Holden vehicles from the Elizabeth Plant each day. For sure, in those years there was real excitement in the air. The air actually smelt different as well. Maybe it was all the industry doing their stuff? Maybe it was the Maralinga Bomb Tests & Woomera Rocket Range.


Yep it was all happening alright & in a good way.


Doesn't smell like that anymore unfortunately.

In 1970 GM-H had manufacturing plants in Melbourne and Adelaide, assembly plants in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and employed 26,000 Australians. Add in the other motor manufacturers and assemblers and see what a dog's breakfast the politicians made of just one important industry. This one of the reasons why there are 800,000 Australians who don't have jobs but should have.

Originally Posted by 67hardtop

As a child, we lived on one of those huge Esperance properties. Dad worked as a mechanic at the time on one. We had our own house, as supplied, and neighbours were at least 2 miles away. Party phone line. Close at shop was Condinup, where I started school in grade 1, at Condinup primary. Good old days. Cheers

Art Linkletter was probably the best known of several big farming operations during that period. My late father was very interested in expanding into the area, but he could not sell the dairy farm that we had near Bunbury. One of our neighbours that consisted of a family of three brothers did buy into the area, while maintaining their dairy farm.

Life and times of Art Linkletter - ABC Esperance - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Caratti lands top farm as Elders axes forests | The West Australian

MobileMarshies: AT LAST - CONDINGUP AND THE DUKE OF ORLEANS BAY CARAVAN PARK (13 -22 MARCH 2015)

Oil Rig Tenders

Call Outs: My job went from mostly just going to a tender either as second engineer or extra, to mostly being call out based. I was to attend break downs or problems and either fix them or supervise local contractors. In addition, I was to attend dry docks and new buildings as the need arose, all of this from my home address most of the time. Of course, there was no email in those days so everything was done over the phone. I had a meter installed on my telephone and charged back all company related calls.

AOS had at least one tender working overseas, in this case Brunei. There may have been others, but I cannot recall exactly. We also did several dry dockings in Singapore, and sent an expat manager to live there at one time. With the P & O company connection we were given office space with them, and an apartment was leased.

I can no longer recall the sequence of some of the following, as they all occurred over a couple of years, but the procedure was basically the same in each case; a phone call message to go and fix something.

"Lady Sarah" had been in Singapore, maybe to load out drilling equipment, or to have some repairs done. She was based in Brunei and on the way back from Singapore the auto pilot failed. For the life of me I cannot recall the manufacturer of the auto pilot. The radar was a Decca, the old type that needed a hood over the CRT to be able to read it in daylight. We usually called "Comnavonics", a marine electronics company based in Melbourne for items like this. On this occasion the superintendent engineer asked me if I would go and have a look at it.

I am not an electronics technician by any means, and was a bit apprehensive. No problem says he;
"come to Melbourne first and spend a day at Comnavonics and they will show you how to fix it"! Yeah right!

So off I go: Albany > Perth overnight > Melbourne two nights > Singapore overnight > and then to Brunei where they arranged for Lady Sarah to be alongside, I think at Muara port.

I was basically familiar with how a ships auto pilot functioned: an output signal from the gyro compass, processed by the auto pilot electronics, an output to a relay panel that controlled the hydraulic pumps output in both direction and volume. The hydraulic pumps were pilot valve controlled swash plate types of pumps. For emergency steering a "telemotor" hand hydraulic pump is usually used that isolates the pumps and directs hydraulic pressure directly into the ships tiller ram.

What I learnt at Comnavonics was that the auto pilot had a test function, whereby the output of the controller was able to be tested without running the steering motors. The rudder indicator would show that (I think it was referred to as a "phantom rudder") all the electronics were functioning correctly. As the hydraulic pumps were running correctly, and handwheel steering was functioning, it just left the bit in between. The relays were in a box next to the pumps in the engine room. A long terminal strip with tunnel type connections was the interface.

A quick going over of ALL the screws found one loose connection that was the culprit!

There had been some repair work carried out in the area, but I can no longer recall just what. It MAY have been that the interconnecting cable had been removed to facilitate the repairs.
For sure SOMEONE had been into the connection box for whatever reason, and from that day onwards I have always been suspicious of small Asians having weak wrists!

So, to all youse fridgies, that is a CALL OUT!

to be continued

Originally Posted by Old Farang

Art Linkletter was probably the best known of several big farming operations during that period. My late father was very interested in expanding into the area, but he could not sell the dairy farm that we had near Bunbury. One of our neighbours that consisted of a family of three brothers did buy into the area, while maintaining their dairy farm.

Life and times of Art Linkletter - ABC Esperance - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Caratti lands top farm as Elders axes forests | The West Australian

MobileMarshies: AT LAST - CONDINGUP AND THE DUKE OF ORLEANS BAY CARAVAN PARK (13 -22 MARCH 2015)

Art Linkletter's property was the one across the road from us. Don't know which Yank owned the property dad worked on. What I do remember is the Aussie foreman running it at that time sacked my dad when he found out he was German. That's when we moved into Esperance shire caravan park on the sea front and were living in 2x2 man tents for a few weeks until some nice old chap gave us a caravan to live in. Dad got a job working for the Holden dealer at the time. The owner of the dealership was so pleased with my father's work that he was foreman shortly after starting there.

Oil Rig Tenders

Along for the ride:

Old timers' disease again gets in the way of this little expedition in regards of whether or not it was tacked on to the end of the last callout.
But one thing is absolutely clear; it was at the end of April 1975 when Saigon fell!

For whatever reason I was again on board "Lady Sarah" in Brunei, to do what I don’t know as I was not part of the regular crew. The tender was on charter to BSP (Brunei Shell Petroleum), a part of the huge Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell.

The captain was called to an urgent meeting at the BSP office, and came back to inform us that we MAY have to sail to Vietnam. This must have been around the middle of April. Shell maintained an office in Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City), and because of the turmoil at that time they were concerned about getting their staff and families out by normal civilian flights.

BSP had, and still do, operate their own helicopter fleet to service both exploration rigs along with production facilities. They proposed to have Lady Sarah tow a big flat top floating barge to offshore Vietnam to act as both a landing and refuelling helipad. I recall towing the barge from wherever it was moored to the BSP port, probably at Seria, and using the Lady Sarah's fire pumps to clean the deck of accumulated crud.

BSP helicopters were the venerable Sikorsky S-61s, the civil version of Sea Kings. At the time they also had a small piston engine helicopter, probably a Hughes 300 as they were called then. One of the bosses turned up in it much to my delight, as I am fascinated with any helicopter. (more about them later!) Many drums of fuel were loaded on the barge, not on the tender. We were then told to standby connected up ready to leave. I should have gotten off at this stage, but for whatever reason I did not. I went to bed only to wake up in the morning to find that we were underway on the way to Vietnam!

Give or take it is around 700 nm from Brunei to Vietnam, so it would have taken at least 3 days sailing to get there. I still cannot recall if the helicopter was towed on the barge, or flown over once we arrived, but given the limited fuel range, plus the uncertainty of just where the barge would be, I suspect it was onboard the barge.

But arrive we did, right into the biggest part of the US Seventh Fleet! The US had several nominated offshore stations during the war, and I think that where we were was about 50 or 60 nm from the coast off Vung Tau. (US Task Force 76)

Operation Frequent Wind - Wikipedia

The water depth was too deep to anchor, so we were obliged to slowly sail up and down, much to the annoyance of some of the commanders of the ships in the 7^th Fleet! We were continually harassed on the radio about who we were and WTF we were doing on THEIR patch!

After a couple of days of this procedure BSP informed us that they had managed to evacuate all of their staff out of Saigon by civilian flights, and could they please have their helicopter returned to Brunei!

So, enough of this larky for me, I need to get back to work! I guess that the helicopter crew had been living on board the Lady Sarah, as the barge had no accommodation.
"So, do you have room for me on your fight back to Brunei"?
"No problem says them"! The crew were all English, probably ex-military, as civilian S-61 pilots in particular were thin on the ground at that time.

As the range of the S-61 of that type is about 250 nm we were going to need more fuel than the tanks could hold for the roughly 700 nm flight to Anduki in Brunei. Fuel we had in abundance, but it was all in 44 gallon drums onboard the barge! (Jet A1, kerosene)

Again, no problem. There was at least one engineer on board, at least two pilots, plus this hitch hiker. The fuel tanks on the S-61 are under the cabin floor and there are big removable inspection plates screwed over them. We may have reduced the amount of fuel in several 44 gallon drums to make them easier to handle, or we may have pumped it from the barge drums into empty drums put on board, but whatever, it was just a matter of removing the tank covers and pouring the fuel directly into the tanks when it was needed!

The flight back to Brunei was uneventful. The pilots main concern was the unpredictable US 7^th fleet, and their trigger happy commanders. Although not good practice, they elected to fly very low over the ocean, at least for the initial part of the trip. I still clearly remember one of the pilots calling out: "Geez, watch out for submarine periscopes"!

On arrival at Anduki heliport I also recall one of the crew calling out to the ground staff after we landed: "we have one of the Australians with us". I have no idea just what the legal position was, after all, it was an international flight, but nothing was said or done. I did find out later that AOS had needed to buy some exorbitant insurance cover for both Lady Sarah and all the crew, me included, as it was considered a "war zone" where we went.

Epilogue:

There is both a funny and a sad story following this episode.

The Australian captain and mate were both well known to me, and well regarded within AOS. I do not recall just where it happened, it may even have been in Australia, but at some long forgotten time and place I was onboard a tender with the same captain. We must have been tied up in port wherever it was, and I guess the captain had been for a run ashore and returned about three sheets in the wind. The next morning when I got out of bed the complete deck area in our accommodation was soaking wet, with water still oozing from somewhere. Tracking down where the "leak" originated from led us to the captain's cabin, where he was found ASLEEP sitting in the shower with his big hairy arse covering the drain hole and the shower still running!

I must admit that he frightened the life out of me as I thought that he was dead!

Strange as it may seem, around 20 years later I was working on an oil rig off the coast of Vietnam, not far from where we had been in 1975. The tender (not AOS) had a crew change scheduled, and as sometimes happened, the crew came on board the rig to wait for the helicopter.
And who should it be but the very same captain!

We had about 30 minutes to go over old times and he told me that the mate we were with in Vietnam was listed in Australia as a "missing person". He has in fact never been found to this day. Stranger still it turned out that the last time that he had been seen was in 1991 just 10 kms from where my late parents, and for a while myself, lived. He was 61 years old at the time. RIP old mate.

s-61_pr-hrs.jpg

This not the helicopter involved, although it was later in Brunei:
Helicopter Sikorsky S-61N Serial 61-488 Register N903CH C-FRMH PR-HRS N263F V8-UDQ VR-UDQ G-AZCF used by VIH Helicopters Ltd Costa do Sol Taxi Aereo Aeroleo Taxi Aereo HRT Participações em Petróleo SA (HRT) Erickson VIH Cougar Brunei Shell Petroleum British European Airways (BEA). Built 1971. Aircraft history and location

1981-06-8

08jun81 flown from Gatwick to Brunei to join the Shell Brunei fleet. The flight took 17 days, 85 flying hours, 25 sectors, arriving at Anduki Airport, Brunei on 24jun81

Sikorsky S61N Specifications, Cabin Dimensions, Performance

I don't agree with the following report, but it does show some of the country:

Highlights of Brunei

to be continued

I liked the bit about being hollered at by the 7th Fleet !

and if the reply was ‘ we are Australian’s ‘ their comprehension might have been zero


dave

Thank you for another great episode in your life, OF. (or should I refer to you as Richard now?)

Always more interesting when posts contain Images & this one certainly does that with bells on.