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Gentlemen,
For your perusal. Here are some pictures of the Bendigo Ordnance Factory, featured on the Bendigo Advertiser website.
Walk again amongst the machines at the Bendigo Ordnance Factory | Bendigo Advertiser
Perhaps someone from Bendigo can comment on what the site is like now? Did it become ADI?
Regards,
Joe
You are right, it became ADI and then Thales (Spanish-owned I believe). They only make the Bushmaster vehicles now If I'm correct. The general machining factory was sold off to a private company who is now manufacturing on the site. We (you and I and the other tax payers) don't own anything there any more....
But Peter K. may have a lot more detail and may post some of his photos. Peter????
Thales is French, partially owned by the French Government.Quote:
Originally Posted by jhovel
Has a long ancestry.
Manufacturers of high quality civil and defence equipments.
No association, except for working on some of their "stuff".
An interesting array of photos.
Due to my recent age it would have been hard for me to determine what I was looking at for most of the photos. Pretty good to get a description along with the photos.
What a great collection!!!
The expertise to use those big machines to build supersized "stuff" back when a slide rule was an "innovation". Would there be such factories still making such "stuff" in Australia today? Or has it mostly gone offshore?
Agreed we are losing/have lost much of our heavy engineering capacity, but follow the money trail to see where it is now. Big mining and offshore oil/gas work is a huge customer for those with real capacity and ability. To find out where the ADI/Thales capacity has gone, look up hofmannengineering.com (not Hoffman) and see a company that knows where it is going. Now operates in Perth, Bendigo, Melbourne, Canada and India and who knows where next?
Think they are still basically a family controlled firm, who re-invest in good staff and equipment and are not beholden to a board whose main concern is a bunch of hungry shareholders. Seems their German heritage still shares the German investment philosophy that has made that nation a success where much of the world is failing. There is some good news out there if we look.
Regards,
Combustor.
Should have been a link to www.hofmannengineering.com My mistake,
Combustor.
Great to see some old Aussie engineering photos. Cheers
The naval turret may be for the old daring class destoyers we had Mike