When and where were bearings made in Australia? If you have found an Australian-made ball bearing in some vintage equipment, how old is it?
So far in restoring Australian-made tools and equipment the only Australian-made bearings I have found have had Echuca stamped on them. As it turns out, Echuca is a town in Victoria, Australia which used to house a bearing factory. It’s a little over 200km north of Melbourne and at the time it was a trade hub due to it’s proximity to the road and rail network, as well as being situated close to the junction of the Goulburn, Campaspe and Murray rivers.
During World War II (1942) the Australian government spent £100,000 building a factory in Echuca – to build ball bearings, primarily for the defence industry’s needs during WWII. £70,000 was for machinery and £30,000 was for the building. By the end of the war the Echuca Ordnance Factory (later the United Bearing Corporation Pty. Ltd., or UBCO) employed 147 people in a single shift, and at that point in time it was the only ball bearing manufacturer in the country. It primarily (exclusively?) manufactured single row ball bearings. I found a footnote on the Australian War Memorial site which stated that to avoid duplication of plant, the forgings of races and the original stampings of the balls was done at the Ordnance Factory in Bendigo and sent to Echuca for precision finishing.
3rd August 1945 saw Agendum No. 305/194 submitted to the War Cabinet which recommended that the factory add a new section for the purpose of manufacturing tapered roller bearings. The proposal was apparently recommended by the Minister of Munitions (Norman Makin).
This is apparently a photo of the lunchroom in 1945:
14th July 1947 saw The Riverine Herald report that the Echuca Ball Bearing Factory was doing well after the war and that there were a large number of civilian orders.
Here are some photos from a September 1949 catalogue:
The catalogue can be found here. It states that broadly the bearings made conformed to the British Standard Specification for Ball and Roller Bearings, with some exceptions for automotive applications where American specifications were observed. Not only did the factory manufacture bearings, it also reconditioned them – especially in circumstances where replacement bearings were in short supply.
The catalogue shows that at that point in time the factory made both inch and metric bearings.
This is dated 1950 and shows some of the staff:
1953-1955 saw Alan Sydenham Cooley work as the manager of the factory, at which time it was apparently making ball bearings for the then-new Holden car . He moved on to manage the Lithgow Small Arms Factory and in the 1960s took on roles such as the Controller-General of Munitions and Secretary of the Department of Supply. He was knighted in 1976.
In 1959 the Swiss bearing company Svenska Kullagerfabriken (Swedish Ball Bearing Factory, more commonly known as SKF) became joint owners in the Echuca factory. At the time SKF had an annual turnover of SEK1,900million and employed 45,000 people worldwide.
An aerial photo of the then-UBCO factory in 1964:
In 1972 Wolfgang Sievers took some photos of the UBCO factory:
The rest of the catalogue can be seen here.
In 1974 SKF assumed full control of UBCO, but four years later they closed down the factory, blaming the government’s alterations to import regulations for it’s closure.
At some later point the company Foodmach took over at least part of the building.