New Zealand printing engineer Don Hamilton-Gates retires this month after more than 50 years servicing printing presses in Australia and New Zealand.
The Millar Samson engineer was trained on Heidelberg and Roland presses in the 1950’s with Seligson & Clare Aust PTY Ltd, in Melbourne, finishing it off at the Heidelberg factory in Germany.
Like most people who trained in this era, Hamilton-Gates takes with him into retirement a number of good stories including the raft of changes he’s experienced in nearly six decades of service to the printing industry.
Some of the more hair-raising include the installation of a press four floors up a Melbourne building, using a hydraulic service lift run on water. He says he was half way up the building with the press when morning tea time rang out. As people rushed to fill their kettles for their cuppa, pressure suddenly dropped and so did the lift, all the way to bottom.
Hamilton-Gates says he jumped onto the top of the press, a move which saved his life as the press crashed against the side of the lift.
He’s seen significant changes in printing processes from the once popular letterpress machines to today’s largely automatic, computer controlled presses.
While he concedes that presses are now both faster and more accurate, he still prefers those that are more mechanically run, because he says they are easier to fix.
“In mechanical things you can see what’s happening, in computers you can’t.”
He also pays tribute to the solid construction of some of the printing presses he has, repaired and installed.
He says he was amazed to find on a fire salvage job that a Heidelberg Cylinder 21×28 letterpress machine which had fallen four floors in a printing plant in Melbourne, was in perfect working order once it was cleared from the rubble over it.
“All that was destroyed were some rubber hoses, but once we’d cleaned the machine up and got it going, it worked perfectly,” he says.
