Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 14

ON REPAIRS

Cleeco Shirts

In the area shown in the above photo (click it for full-size), just off Broadway, in Mountain Street near the Grace Bros emporium, was a small three-story building which housed Cleeco Shirts.

We were doing major repair or modernisation work which entailed working in the pit, digging old brickwork out, because I recall using a Kango electric jackhammer......something like this:-

George Farham was the fitter but I can't remember who else was there....Dave Rutter possibly.

At the time, George owned a blue Morris 1100 and would drive it to that job, because there were all-day parking spots in the street at the time we started work, which was before the office workers in the area arrived.

George lived in the Eastern Suburbs somewhere.....around Maroubra or Randwick, I think.

His route took him past Centennial Park, or through the park, because he usually took the shortcut.

Back in those days the park was accessible to road traffic all the time...I don't know if that is still the case today.

Anyway, one morning George arrived at work with the front of his car covered in black ash and he didn't know why. He hadn't been near anything which would have dumped cinders all over the car and it was a bit of a mystery. Any damage was only superficial......paint was not burnt off. It was just covered in blackened bits of leaves and grass, particularly in the grille.

The mystery was explained the next day.

George retraced his route and when driving through Centennial Park he noticed a mound of cinders and ashes where the park workers had been burning a pile of prunings and grass cuttings. (You could do that back then).

Apparently he had meandered off the beaten track after having had one too many at the pub on the way home and had simply driven straight through the ash pile but couldn't remember it when he got up the following morning!

Aaah! The perils of driving under the influence before breathalysers arrived some 18 years later (1982).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dave Rutter and Bobby Coates "Fix" a lift.

50 York St. on right, with Grace Blg in the background on the left.

It may have been at 50 York Street, it's old enough.....but then again, it could have a been the building where the scaffolding is seen. But it was just down the road from Grace building.

The lift was a manual passenger unit, driven by a sulky old lift driver who always had something to whinge about.
On this particular occasion, Bobby Coates needed a hand with something or other so Dave Rutter and I strolled with him from Grace Blg - where Bobby had his maintenance depot.
When we walked in the front door - the lift was just inside the foyer - the driver started to moan and groan that something was wrong on top of the lift....I can't remember exactly what it was....something to do with a noise..... but the looks that Bobby and Dave exchanged indicated that it was most likely a load of rubbish.

We got into the lift and Bobby asked the bloke to take it for a run up and down, so that they could see or or hear anything odd.
We then stopped at one of the upper floors, where we got out and the driver was instructed to take it down so that Bobby and Dave could get on top of the car.

When the roof was at floor level they climbed onto the top-bow and the two mechanics had a good look around and had the driver run up and down the shaft again whilst they sat on the roof, listening and watching for strange happenings! They found nothing out of the ordinary....no bits of loose equipment, nothing hitting anything as the car moved up and down the shaft. Everything was fine.
They then came back to the floor where I was waiting.

Dave and Bobby exchanged whispers and then one of them asked me to pass them a hammer from the tool-bag.
Dave then started hitting various bits of the roof superstructure, with loud metallic sounds echoing up & down the shaft and, at the same time, he and Bobby were grinning like monkeys as they exhanged a running commentary along the lines of:-

"How's it look now, Dave?"
"Pretty good, Bob...maybe just a bit more to the left. What d'ya reckon"?
"Yeah....okay (BANG!). How's that now?"
"Looks good, mate.....I think that's fixed it".

Of course, the driver couldn't see what was going on and I was struggling to contain my laughter!

With the little one-act play over, the guys got off the roof, the driver brought the car back to floor level and we went for a few runs up and down the shaft.
The driver was pleased that everything seemed okay once again!

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 13

ON REPAIRS - AFTER GRACE BUILDING

Eventually the modernisation job came to an end and we relocated to other jobs, several of which I can recall with ease:-

Tomasetti House

I think that this building was located on the corner of Kent & Bathurst Streets. (The Google Maps photo is of the building we worked in....I think). It was down the back of the Town Hall, if memory serves correctly, but it's hard to recognise many of the older, insignificant, buildings now that their facades and surroundings have changed over 50+ years.

EDIT. 25-October-2017
My thanks to Bob Deahm for correcting my original location, which I had as Sussex & Bathurst Streets.
Bob is sure that address was "Sunderland House" and I agree.

I'm not sure exactly what the repair job was at Tomasetti, although I do remember rewiring door locks and doing some "stuff" in the motor room.

The bods on the job included myself, Dave Rutter, George Farham, the Hudson brothers...Kevin and Dennis... and another apprentice by the name of Frank, who wore glasses.

(More of Frank below, under Washington H. Soul Pattinson).

It was at this job that George Farham threw away his perfectly good pliers after he latched onto what he thought was the end of a bit of old VIR wiring. It was in the somewhat dark and dingy lift pit that this incident occurred.

When George gave the "wire" a good yank the skin of a decomposed rat appeared...complete with eye-watering odour. George tossed his pliers - and rat - across the pit and that was the last he saw of both!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

332 Kent Street

Not sure of the crew on this one or even what the work entailed (other than setting a lot of conduits) but I can definitely remember working here because it was directly opposite the Kent St. entrance to Radio 2UW ....... "Eleven-ten on your dial"!

We would watch Ward "Pally" Austin arrive & depart in his Cadillac, usually with a group of teenage girls hanging around the door waiting for him.

This is what the two buildings look like today......looking north, with 2UW on the left and our building on the right.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Washingon H. Soul Pattinson, Pitt Street.

I have mentioned this building in an earlier item but we now come to the time when an electrician by the name of Helmut Nehls (nicknamed "Crash-hat" by George Farham!), the mysterious Frank and myself were doing something electrical here.

I refer to Frank as "mysterious" simply because I know nothing else about him - can't recall his surname and I don't think I ever worked with him other than here and at Tomasetti House.

The drama occurred.....SEE THE FACTUAL DETAILS IN FRANK'S REPLY, BELOW MY INCORRECT VERSION! .... when Frank was standing in front of the control board ready to test which of the 415 Volt A, B and C phases had dropped power.

Instead of using a test lamp (every electrician carried a test lamp in his leather bag), for some weird reason Frank took one wire and touched it to one of the other two!

Needless to say, the two he touched were the live ones.
There was a blinding flash accompanied by a very loud BANG! and the entire building lost all electrical power and, from what I understand, so did several other adjacent premises.
Frank was very lucky that he was wearing glasses because at the very least they prevented flash burns to his eyes and quite possibly saved his eyesight. As it was his face was blackened and he had no eyebrows left.

I think he went up to Sydney Hospital (Macquarie Street) for first aid.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 12

ON REPAIRS - GRACE Building (Continued)

The Big Bang!

With a manually-operated lift, the makeup of the control-board was pretty simple

Apart from a couple of smaller contactors or relays for the door-lock & safety circuitry, there were two large, 480V DC contactors, one for Up and one for Down and which were operated by a solenoid.

Very simply, when the driver operated his car switch then the core of the solenoid was energised and the electromagnetism thus generated pulled the moving part of the contactor inwards and large copper contacts met up with large carbon contacts, the lift motor was energised and the lift moved in the appropriate direction.

As well as the essential Up and Down contactors, safety-circuit relays and fuses the board may also have featured a stepping-solenoid contactor set, which allowed the lift to accelerate smoothly.

A typical 480V DC lift controller of the era

The slate on which all this large, heavy and banging-in-and-out stuff was mounted was around an inch thick and part of the maintenance task was to wipe down any carbon-dust, not just because of cleanliness but also because a buildup of dust could lead to electrical "tracking" between components.

One afternoon, Bobby Coates, whose maintenance depot was Grace Building, was standing in front of one of the control-boards with another mechanic (I don't recall who it was) and they were looking at a crack which was just noticable on one side of the board, starting at one of the direction contacts.

Bobby was probing the crack with a piece of stiff plastic or something similar....whatever it was it was most certainly not electrically conductive....as he and the other bod investigated to see how far it went and to where.

Suddenly there was an almighty BANG! accompanied by a bright green flash which lit up the motor-room. I was on the other side of the room and even from that distance my ears were ringing!

Bobby and whoever-it-was staggered back...fortunately, because it was away from the board and into a recess where a small table and a couple of seats were situated.

They were blinded for a minute or so, also deafened and with carbon dust on their faces and were extremely lucky not to have been burnt.

Naturally the horrible (I hated those things with a passion!) open-air circuit breaker (located on the wall next to the motor-room access steps) for that lift had blown....its BANG! and green arc also adding to the noise and flash produced by the controller.

When Bobby and the other bloke had recovered and the lift was isolated and removed from service it was discovered that the crack, fine though it was, ran from one of the fixed contacts on the Up contactor across to a fixed contact on the adjacent Down contactor and it contained carbon dust...an excellent conductor of electricity.

When the lift driver operated the car-switch 480 volts of direct current travelled from Up to Down, causing a very spectacular short-circuit.

If memory serves, that lift was out of action until the crack in the slate was enlarged, thoroughly cleaned out and filled with epoxy as a temporary repair. I think that at a later date a new, composite (not slate) board was installed.

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 11

ON REPAIRS - GRACE BUILDING (Continued)

I meet Chips Rafferty.

In the era in which we worked at Grace Building it was the Sydney HQ of the Commonwealth Department of Veteran's Affairs. That was only a decade after the end of the Korean War and just on 20 years since the end of World War 2.

As a result, there were many, many ex-servicemen and ex-service women who came into the building. Nothing was done "on line" back then - it was all face-to-face (like banking).

One day I was sitting on an upper floor, above halfway, outside a lift, with the car situated far enough above the floor so that I could access the junction box under the car.

The landing doors were chocked open far enough for me to get access to the planks which ran across from the landing to the counterweight guide-rail bracket on the far wall of the shaft, where they were secured by lashings to the steel bracket. The landing-side ends of the planks were "secured" by a counter-weight filler sitting on them.

Attached to the underbow was a short lanyard with a hook and a spring-loaded keeper thingy on the end, which clipped into the safety harness I was wearing. My task was to strip the ends of wires in the new annunciator travelling cable and connect them to the terminals in the under-car j-box.

There I was, sitting crossed-legged on the end of the planks where they rested on the landing floor (on tar-paper stuff so as not to damage the tiled floor), snipping away with my trusty side-cutters and stripping wires with my trusty strippers when a voice said, "G'day son. Waddaya doin' there?".

I looked up, and then got a crick in my neck by trying to angle my head even further back, and there was Chips, gazing down at me as he rolled a cigarette, the paper (no doubt a Tally-ho) hanging from his bottom lip. The tobacco was definitely Champion-brand, because he was holding the packet as he rolled his smoke.

To anyone my age and a bit older, Chips Rafferty (real name John Goffage - see link) was the quintessential Aussie - tall, lanky, sun-tanned and with a laid-back, laconic air. He was to the 1950s and 1960s what Paul Hogan's "Crocodile Dundee" was to the 1980s and 1990s.

My earliest memory of Chips was seeing him in the "Smiley" movies (1950s), in which he played a country policeman.

 The last movie in which I saw him - and which was the last he made before his death - was "Wake In Fright"....in which he played a country copper once again....but this one wasn't quite as nice as the one in "Smiley".

Anyway....back to Grace Building and me looking at Chips rolling his cigarette.
All I could manage to blurt out was something along the lines of "G'day Mr. Rafferty! I'm connecting wires", to which he replied, before walking around the corner, "Well, don't fall down the shaft, son".

I was so gobsmacked to have actually spoken to the man that I didn't even think to ask for his autograph!

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 10

A Random Memory - Tools.

A bit of random reminiscing.......which may occur more often as they pop up from time-to-time.

Back in those days it was the practice for management to fund the purchase of a basic starter tool-kit for the new apprentice.

I'm unsure of what may have been in such a kit for a new Mechanical Fitter, but the Electrical Fitter's kit included (from memory) a pair of insulated pliers, a pair of insulated side-cutters, a wire-stripper, an insulated flat-blade screwdriver, a medium-size un-insulated flat-blade screwdriver, a hacksaw (for cutting steel conduit), a shifting-spanner and a metal toolbox.

There may have been some other odd & sods (multigrips, perhaps?) but that was essentially the kit.

Arnold's had an account with Blackwoods, who used to have a city store down near Sussex Street, I think, so that was where we went to get our tools, armed with a chit from management.

So sometime back in 1964, after I had finished my six-month grind at tech college and when I went "on the tools", I went off to Blackwoods to get my own personal toolkit.

The quality was top-shelf.....there was no cheap Chinese crap flooding the markets back then, no Bunnings or Home Hardware or Mitre 10. Hardware stores sold quality merchandise and what you bought, if looked after and treated with a bit of respect, would last a lifetime.

Tools bought 53 years ago, still in great condition despite much use.

Would you believe that after 53 years (as of this year, 2017) I still have, and use, three of those original purchases; a pair of Swedish "Berg" electrician's pliers, an American "Crescent" shifting-spanner and an Australian "Stanley" electrician's screwdriver.

The others have disappeared over the years....some borrowed and never returned, some just misplaced (wire strippers & side-cutters) and never rediscovered.

But the above three items are as good as the day I bought them, despite having been used many, many times, particularly when I was servicing/restoring my own cars.

The pliers have no nicks in the cutting edges, no slop in the hinge and all the insulation is intact. The shifter is in equally-good condition and the Stanley screwdriver still has a perfectly-flat edge on the blade.

It's true; they just do not make stuff like this anymore or, if they do, it now costs a fortune to buy.

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 9

BUCKINGHAM'S and GRACE BUILDING ANECDOTES from DAVE RUTTER.

I thank Dave very, very much for not only providing the correction to what I had written about car-switch directions (see Part 2) but for also supplying the following bits of hilarity!

Apart from just editing the format for use herein, I haven't modified the information at all.

DAVE at BUCKINGHAM'S.

Roz.

A correction to Roz's proper name. Her name was Rosalie, not Roslyn.

For more than forty years, whenever Garth brought the subject up, Dave could never get him to understand that it wasn't "Roslyn". I obviously had the same problem.

The Ziehl-Abegg motors.

Dave says.....
"They were the quietest motors I have ever come across. In all my time with EPL they used a number of different brands of AC motors both single speed and pole changers such as Rotos, Bruncken and I can’t recall the others but they were never as quiet is the Ziehl-Abegg units. I even suggested to Ralph Ledwidge at one stage that they should install a flashing light in the machine room when any of them were running. That idea fell on deaf ears."

Arnold's Schwarzenegger.
Straight from the horses (Dave's) mouth.....
"Kurt Gahler and I were the first two to start at Buckinghams and Flange [George Farham], Ken Rousham and Alan Andrews followed to help with some of the mechanical work. Then the rest of the mob came along.

Young Kurt Gahler and Dave Rutter. (I don't think this was at Buck's.)

During this time, at lunch times I started to lift some test weights with the aid of a piece of 1-¼” conduit, one weight on each end. One lunch time Flange started to gee me up to try and lift 2 at each end.
Being young and invincible I fell for the bait.
Anyway, I got the weights up past my chest and on the way up in the air when I got the staggers and started dancing around the roof. (This was always done on the roof just outside the machine room).

Eventually one arm must have got tired or I lost balance and one weight on one side slid off the conduit and over the side wall of the building to the lane below. The remainders I just dropped to the deck.
Right below was a large butchers van delivering meat to the food section in the ground floor of Buckingham's.
We all just scarpered, but not before seeing the test weight embedded into the cobblestones about 6 inches from the tailboard lowered to the deck to allow the drivers to wheel the carcases off.

A few hours later we found the weight just sitting on the footpath up against the wall of the building.
Not a single word of it was mentioned to us.
From then on, Flange and Kurt nicknamed me the Strongest Boy in Arnolds.
Only last year I caught up with Kurt who now lives down at Busselton and the first thing he said when he saw me was “Here he is, the strongest boy in Arnolds”."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

DAVE at GRACE BUILDING.
Anyone can blow a fuse.....but this was a blown power station!!
Dave's words.....
"That was some place to work. There were 4800 people employed in the building and probably 80% were young women. I just loved working there. [As did we all! BK]

One incident of note apart from the improved love life was when Larry Evans and I were running some wiring in the machine room next to #3 the passenger lift. We were in the machine room pushing a 60 ft spring steel snake into a conduit and despite my telling Larry on numerous occasions to be very careful because there were exposed items of switch-gear everywhere, he typically was not paying close attention and giggling as he very often did and he allowed the snake to touch the two 480 volt terminals on the tappet switch.  They fused together and all lifts that were running stopped.

We immediately prised the damaged snake from the terminals and raced down and got anyone in any of the lifts out.
I then went down to the basement and checked the fuses and breakers to discover there was no 480 Volt power to the building. The White Bay Power Station had dropped out!
[You read it here first, folks! BK]

White Bay after Larry & Dave blew it up!

White Bay supplied all 480 Volt DC to the city. So, effectively it meant any of the older lifts still running on 480V DC anywhere in the city had stopped, with the possibility that there were passengers stuck everywhere.
We disappeared. Our passengers were all out and all the fuses and breakers in our building were set and ready to go. Problem belonged to somewhere else!!!!!

I never ever let Larry forget this incident though. I often wonder what he is doing these days."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am indebted to Dave for providing these snippets of Arnold's history and freely admit to bursting into laughter when reading the tale about White Bay! I had never heard that one before; he kept it pretty close to his chest for all those years.😀

Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 8

ON REPAIRS - GRACE BUILDING (continued).

Returning to the subject of Grace Building and memories of working there.

WG Watson's and Three-phase conduit.
Arnold's had an account at the trade-supply business of WG Watson, who had shop-fronts in Clarence and Kent Streets. The premises ran through from one street to the other.
From Grace Blg. it was just a two-block walk up the road to the Clarence Street frontage.

The Clarence St. facade of the WG Watson building, which ran through to Kent St.

(Incidentally, in a funny little twist of history, the building which housed WG Watson was the former "Grace House", a warehouse and repository for the Grace family business (Grace Brothers)....the same family which built Grace Building.)

I think my memory is working (and no doubt if I've got this wrong then Dave Rutter will correct me!) in that one day someone was asked to go to WG Watson's with a list of stuff that was needed.
So he hands it over the counter to the sales bloke, who runs his eyes down it and then starts bringing the bit's and pieces to the counter......boxes of connectors, conduit saddles, that sort of thing.

He finally turns to the Arnold's apprentice and without batting an eye said something to the effect of "Tell your boss that we won't have any three-phase conduit in until Monday".