098
COMPANY FOCUS
Eilbeck Heavy Machines lifting above its weight. Charlie Eilbeck is out on a warm March morning, showing writer Brent Balinski around some of Eilbeck Heavy Machinery's recent investments.
Tom Eilbeck (left), and Charlie Eilbeck.
Charlie Eilbeck heads the machining business of Eilbeck Cranes, the parent company which commands 75% of the bespoke overhead crane market in Australia. The machining division opened in 2015 at the site we are touring, which has done well enough to grow its headcount to 40 and open a second workshop (also in Ingleburn). Eilbeck Heavy Machining (EHM) has brought more and more crane component manufacturing in-house, and gone about chasing projects outside of the company. “Building these machine shops has a lot to do with the passion of my father, Tom, because he’s a fitter and turner, and he worked in one growing up. So machine shops allow us to be a very flexible business, but they also come from his heart,” explains the younger Eilbeck. “A lot of what we do is driven by passion. We're not a public company driven by a board of directors where we have to justify when we want to spend three million dollars on a mill. We see opportunity, and we see opportunity in Australia.” If there’s a couple-paragraph distillation of Eilbeck’s ethos – which he shares eagerly through a freewheeling, no-notes presentation on the company’s history, a tour of the original EHM site with a Q&A, and many extensive asides during both – then that might be it. There’s heritage and a determination to build on it, there’s opportunity, there’s pride, there’s risk, but importantly, there’s a willingness to back the family business. We pull up next to an Okuma MCR A5CII, a further demonstration of all of the above, then another peek into the culture of the company. The double-column machining centre was a serious investment, and one big chunk of the $10m the company has spent with the Japanese CNC specialist in the last five years. It was also a leap of faith. But it’s worked out for Eilbeck and his team. “When we bought this, people told us we were mad. We didn’t really have the work for it… We bought it without a plan and without a doubt it’s now our busiest machine,” he explains. “We do a lot of bogies for the railway industry… we gain efficiencies with head changing, tool changing, machine output in terms of the power and capacity and the rigidity. Okuma makes 45 of these double-column machines a month at their factory. And when
AMT JUN 2022
we bought this, we said we’d only do it if we could bring all our tradesmen on Business Class to Japan. And they did.” There is no shortage of challenges to running any kind of manufacturing business in Australia, and that certainly goes for heavy engineering. One thing that stands out during the visit is the emphasis on staff, whether they’re being sent to Japan or kept happy back at Ingleburn, in the manufacturing heartland southwest of Sydney. The capital and the staff aren’t cheap. The competition from imports is strong. Many of the raw products that come in to be machined can’t be made locally, and the international supply chain challenges of this era are well-known. But the biggest issue is around attracting help. “The workload is there but the people aren't,” is the essence of it. Fortunately, only one member has left the EHM team since the division opened in 2015.
Blue and green The Eilbeck group has been making cranes since the 1980s, after Tom Eilbeck bought it from his father as a single-person operation making fencing wire. Charlie is the fourth generation involved in the business, and if he succeeds his father, he will be the first non-Tom to run it. The first Tom, who was also one of the first engineering graduates from University of Western Australia, began T Eilbeck & Son in 1907 as a blacksmith operation on Western Australia’s Swan River. Rather than being a departure from crane-making, Eilbeck says it’s a return to the machine shop business his family operated for a couple of decades beginning in the 1960s and then moved out of. There’s even the occasional reminder of that era, when machine tools were something the company produced. “Sometimes we’ll get a call up now from an extremely old person, somewhere, with a 50-year-old Eilbeck Cranes band saw or machine, asking if we’ve got spares,” he shares, with a pause for effect. “We don’t.”
