The finished pipe storage area

Sha-Tau-Kok near Fanling, adjacent to Chinese border, in the New Territories, north of Kowloon.
The concrete pipe manufacturing plant had a finished product storage yard which was serviced by a very large travelling gantry crane. This facility was built by a Singaporian engineering company, and their contract included the installation and erection. All this proceeded apart from my contract of the actual assembly and erection of the pipe rolling machinery. As soon as production commenced, a separate stacking crew collected the finished pipes in a range of standard internal sizes from four inches (100mm) to over six feet (2 metres). Later even larger pipes were spun. There was a system of old railway lines laid on the ground, from the production points, and the pipes were rolled by hand along these lines to the point where the crane could lift them in slings and dispose them over the stacking area.

We had been in production only a couple of weeks and still with plenty of teething problems, when a memo came to my desk that the stacking crew were complaining that they had problems with the storage area. None of this was my problem, I was still working on modifications on ancillary machinery, but by now I was used to getting memos for me to please go and sort this lot out! It hadn't taken the stacking crew of six members or so, very long to roll a few of the biggest pipes together and with the help of bamboos and plastic sheet, build a cozy little office, where they undoubtedly spent most of their time playing cards and eating. Two men could easily run the operation it seemed – they were in charge of the biggest single piece of machinery on the job, and the foreman considered that they were the elite, and except at odd times there was very little to do, or so he had figured!

Apparently nobody had taken the trouble to inform him that his job was to see that the pipes were stacked according to size, with the stacks being of the most efficient size, with the bottom layer securely chocked and succeeding layers built up in an orderly fashion to make the most efficient use of the area. So without supervision, his crew had just collected the pipes as they rolled off the production line, and probably with ideas of getting back to their card game, had moved the crane the minimum amount of travel necessary to dump the pipes willy-nilly in a great heap, and when the heap became unmanageable a new area was selected and the game went on as before.

There had been a small attempt to stack a few pipes, but there was no real order, and as pipes started to go out to customers, the ones closest were selected to make up the load, but with the volume of production increasing, they were soon left with no ground space to continue with their dumping and an order for one particular size developed into a time consuming hide and seek routine. I only had to take a quick look at the area to realise that the crew hadn't really been working at all! Just a couple on the job at any given time and just to get rid of the pipes! It only took minutes for me to acquaint the Chinese management with the facts, with a few 'never minds' along the way, but no one considered the situation extraordinary, There just wasn't enough room provided during the original planning!

Providence took a hand at this moment – there was a major breakdown on the production line when the new fabricated steel pipe mould provided to spin the biggest pipes yet (made in Taiwan!) exploded on it's first tryout, wrecking a large part of the factory and spreading about eight tons of wet concrete and shattered steel over a wide area. By some miracle, no one was injured or killed, even though there were two workers actually right next to the pipe mould at the moment when it chose to fly apart, luckily they were both in a safe spot.
The first task was to rally the scattered workers and get them on the job clearing away the quick setting concrete over the whole spinning area, then the repair work was commenced. The stopping of production provided an opportunity to put a large part of the work force to work sorting out the pipe stack – this meant running the crane full time and having someone to shout orders and make some sense out of the whole jumbled mess. The smaller pipes could be rolled about by hand and collected into a small stack that could be slung and moved into their new place by the traveling crane, even slightly larger ones could be slung in groups of four or five, while the larger ones were moved individually.

The large gang given the task could see no reason why all this should be done – the production line was stopped, the pipes were still going out to the customers, so why not sit down and play cards? And this is what they started to do! Somehow, with the presence of the overall managers and bosses being reluctantly pressed into the task, after a while the workers got the message and soon there were neat stacks of pipes rising all over the area, and the end result was that most of the area was soon free of the random stacking and the workers were starting to congratulate themselves for being part of an obvious miracle! There was plenty of room!

From there on there was no further trouble and it was accepted that some sort of miracle had cured the whole problem. There was even talk that the Gods had caused the pipe mould to explode and thus the pipe stack was sorted out, and it was a double miracle as the Gods had seen fit to spare the lives of those working close to the accident! Thus everything returned to normal again. It was in fact a good omen!
Some time later a new giant mould was made and production of these pipes began, but it brought a completely new set of problems. Nothing of this size had ever been handled before, and so I had to get to work and organise the laying of extra rail lines from the special large pipe production line to the crane pick up area, and this unfortunately involved a 90 degree change of direction.

Smaller pipes had been slewed about when necessary with crowbars and lengths of wood and, as they became larger more man power was used. It still worked, but the big pipes were immoveable! And so I had to make some quick sketches and with the help of my eldest son who had been hastily recruited from Australia, we soon started the construction of a heavyweight turntable, using whatever was at hand. This ran on a large central pivot bearing and had four ball bearing rollers running on a circular flat track set in concrete, and soon the crews were adept at rolling a pipe on to the turntable, turning it by hand, and then rolling them off on to a long section of storage track that ran for the full available length of the complex, along side of the crane tracks.
These pipes were too heavy for the rated capacity of the existing gantry crane, and lifts were only made under controlled circumstances, but I don't doubt as time went by and new personnel arrived on the job, these restrictions would have been forgotten and lifts would be carried out as a matter of course.

I had reason to learn that there was no way that the use of lifting devices about the plant could be controlled, it was a waste of time to tell the operators that a certain crane was only to be used for quick light lifts, and that the heavier lifts were to be carried out using the heavy duty slower hoists. Within the first week every small hoist in the plant was smashed! And the crews were complaining that they had to move lighter things about by hand. We repaired the hoists, and with education and supervision everything started to go well, but then the company decided to run a night shift, and within a few nights, everything was broken again, so the crews all went back to moving the light stuff by hand as they always had, and did the heavy lifts with the slow HD hoists. Basically proof of a Chinese saying, which in effect says, 'No one can wreck a good piece of machinery quicker than we can, but then again, no one can repair it as well as we do and keep it running forever'! I saw plenty of evidence of this in private engineering concerns, some of the Heath Robinson repairs were beyond belief!

One instance of this was in the use of the pipe moulds on the production line. Moulds varied in length, due to a lack of standardisation in manufacture, but all used long bolts threaded at one end, so that the clamp nuts could be run up and tightened on the end plates, when the empty mould was assembled. When the moulds were stripped from the finished pipe, the long bolts were supposed to be kept together with the mould, while the assembly was cleaned and oiled and then re-assembled with the same bolts.This was unfortunately completely ignored. All the two metre long plus bolts were thrown in a jumbled pile, and when the time came for re-assembly, bolts were selected on the basis that they were at least long enough to do the job, and any surplus length was taken up with readily available spacers, the only problem with this was that the spacers were a handful of the socket tools that abounded in the assembly area. Thus a shortage of spacers would lead one of the workers to visit the store room and requisition out another dozen or so socket spacers.'
This also led to the request for more long bolts! I was first confronted with this strange problem by the sight of pipes spinning on the machines with the overlong bolts protruding dangerously and the shiny new spacers whirling around!

I just could not believe my eyes! I proceeded to take in the whole operation from start to finish, trying to explain that none of this would be necessary if the correct bolts were always used, but all this was treated as if it were some strange mysterious built in mechanical fault, and 'Never Mind', the spacers did the job OK?
Even stranger was the confrontation with the storeman, who considered the success of his job to be commensurate with the number of tools that he issued over his counter! This also applied to the chap in charge of buying in tools, he was extremely proud of the number of tools on his shopping list, and amazingly there was never any system in place to check on these outgoings. This particular problem was always near the top of my list when coming on to a new job, some stores inventories were absolutely staggering, and the worker's tool chests were a dazzling array of sparkling new tools, most of them never used, this sort of thing is an Asian status symbol and is difficult to control once it gets out of hand. There is also the reluctance of the storeman to take used tools back into the store, this means more work for him, especially if a crackdown on the problem has been initiated, much better to have a neat clean store and a box full of workers cards full of tools out on requisition!

On a later job at Singapore, this led to another stores problem, one which revolved around the lurk of a new employee taking his place on the night shift, being issued with the standard store card. Over a few nights of taking out numerous electric and hand tools – even complete oxy cutting torch sets – he then failed to appear for work again! Only a full scale crackdown on the stores by myself brought this matter to light, the storeman couldn't care less, and no one really considered the loss of a new employee after a few nights unusual, but the investigation revealed quite a large quantity of never to be returned tools. Part of this investigation revealed that the night shift personnel manager was quite bent and a lot of the missing equipment had passed through the perimeter fence at night into the hands of his conspirators, and the so called new employees were his friends and part of his racket! Just part of the local Mafia that is present almost everywhere you go in Asia.