Eye For Detail

By Clayton Roxborough

Six years ago, Brisbane Drafting Service (BDS) was one of the largest and most enduring steel detailing companies in Australia. In 2016 the business was aquired by US based conglomerate, DBM Vircon.

For  Queensland based steel detailers, BDS was seen as a powerhouse of the industry. As a prolific trainer of cadets and development of new talent, Brisbane Drafting Service was a veritable breeding ground for highly skilled draftsmen, many of whom went on to filter throughout the steel construction industry in various engineering, design and drafting offices across the country.

On a personal note, BDS was the first employer in my steel detailing career. In 1986 I completed my 4 year long cadetship at their office in Tribune Street South Brisbane and years later, BDS was one of my first clients when I struck out on my own.

But the BDS story goes a long way back, well before my time. In this edition of the “Eye for Detail” we hear from the man who was the driving force behind this Queensland institution, Mr Vince Rehbein. WhenVince retired in 2007, the BDS group consisted of 8 offices across 7 countries.

Since then Vince has maintained an interest in the happenings of the steel detailing industry, here in Australia and around the globe.

The early days of Steel Detailing in Australia
A memoir by Vince Rehbein

I left school at the end of 1959 after completing Year 10 At the Christian Brothers High School in Bundaberg, Queensland. I was then very fortunate to obtain a cadetship with Evans Deakin & Co’s drawing office at Rocklea. In July, 1965, Neil Cooke, another EDCO detailer, started Brisbane Drafting Service and asked me to join him. I eventually bought out Neil’s share in 1975.

Neither Neil or I had any capital so all our initial furniture was purchased at Queensland government used equipment auctions. Our first drawing benches were made by a mate I played football with who was an apprentice carpenter. The tops were domestic doors.

In 1965 there were no independent drawing offices specializing in shop detailing in Brisbane. There was one operating in Sydney (Sydney Drafting Service) although specialized Shop Detailers had been operating in the USA for a number of years. Draftsmen that were efficient in speed and accuracy would leave after completing their cadetship at EDCO and get a job with SDS because they were paid according to their ability. After “moonlighting” at home for a couple of fabricators I joined Neil at BDS.

We had to sell the idea of subcontracting work to us when the fabricator had his own drawing office before we even got to price and delivery. Because of the excellent training at EDCO we could offer our personal abilities of accurate and efficiently priced work.

Our first office was under the house of Neil’s parents’ home in Dutton Park. We eventually moved to an office in Kangaroo Point, then Montague Road (West End, Brisbane) and then built our own office building in Tribune Street (South Brisbane). As we eventually needed more space we built another building on an adjoining block. BDS stayed at that location until it was sold to DBM in 2016. Over the years as we acquired more and more work we needed to expand and at times had two other offices in Montague Road, as well as one at the corner of Vulture Street and Grey Street and another in Stanley Street where the Queensland Children’s Hospital now stands.

There is an interesting story behind the office in Stanley Street. When Geoff and I inspected it prior to purchasing it we noted on the second floor there were a number of, say 4m x 3m, rooms complete with a separate shower!

Our first office outside Brisbane was in Townsville from 1966-68. We also had offices in Melbourne, Jakarta and Singapore along the way. The Singapore office was a joint partnership with Keppel Shipyard.

Mounted on the desks were drawing boards at an angle of approximately 20 degrees. Lines were drawn using a Tee Square and an adjustable set-square. Later we progressed to drafting machines, then 2D Computer Aided drawings and finally 3D models.

In those days it was an industrial right to have a 20 minute break for “morning tea” and “afternoon tea”. Some of the senior draftsmen at Evans Deakin liked a cup of hot tea for “morning tea” and had their own “billies”. (a used 500ml jam tin [can] with a wire handle). It was a chore of the first year cadets to take the billies downstairs to a hot water urn and make the tea for those who enjoyed their cuppa. At BDS I thought that quite unproductive and put it to the office that if we purchased one of these new fan-dangled coffee machines they could have as many cups a day as they liked but must drink it at their desks, with no break. That idea was unanimously accepted (well almost).

Back then engineering drawings were produced using ink pens on tracing paper. Various thicknesses of lines were accomplished with a “ruling pen”. The width of the line was made by adjusting the tips of the pen with a screw. One of the major setbacks of ink on tracing paper was in erasing. What needed to be erased had first to be scratched off the paper using a razor blade and then the roughed surface had to be smoothed with a hard “rubber” or eraser.

All drawings then had to be reproduced as a “blue print”. This was another cumbersome and time-consuming process. The drawing was placed on a light sensitive and chemically coated sheet of paper which was passed through a high intensity light machine. Then the paper was placed in a bath of acid which reacted with the remaining chemical coating for some minutes. The sheet was then soaked in a bath of water to remove the acid and then each sheet had to be hung in a drying room before being able to be used! An extremely slow process.

Trigonometry calculations had to solved the hard way. We had a book of tables called “Smoley’s Four Combined Tables” (200 deep x 140 wide x 70 thick). To calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle (say base of 15’-6 ½ ” and a height of 9’-8 5/8”one had to look up the logarithm of the square of 15’-6 ½” and then add that to the logarithm of the square of 9’-8 5/8”. The resultant was then converted by looking that number in the anti-log square root tables to arrive at 18’-3 15/16”. That also gave a “slope” of something in 12 (in this case 7 ½ in 12). That was how the boilermakers set out gusset plates, etc.

Design calculations were done with a “slide rule”, also using logarithms. The answer being approximate as one had to read the resultant off a scale of the rule.

The most interesting project we ever worked on was detailing all the mechanical parts on the rotating and opening roof of the Sliding Springs Observatory in NSW. For this we opened a separate office in Montague Road, West End, Brisbane, and hired a mechanical engineer and specialist mechanical draftsmen to complement our guys.

Over the years BDS worked for some of Australia’s leading fabricators at that time:

Allco, Newcastle, Transfield, Sydney, Johns and Waygood, Melbourne, T. O’Connor & Sons, Adelaide,

Forward Down, Perth, as well as, Krupp Industries, Germany – cement plant in Malaysia, United Engineers, Singapore – sugar terminal in Mauritius.

In 1970 I visited the USA to see how the business operated over there. One of my mates, Tom Fitzgibbon, a former employee and former detailer at EDCO, was then working at a detailing office in Los Angeles (Draftech, Inc). I visited several other offices across the US. One of the eyeopeners was to see they created their drawings with pencils on vellum paper. This looked so much more efficient than ink on tracing paper which was the way we were doing it in Australia. Vellum was not available in Australia so we imported some rolls from the US.

When large photo copiers became available I decided we could do our drawings in pencil on ordinary white paper. We had come a long way and our efficiency improved monumentally.

Next we purchased our first computer that could do trigonometric calculations. Guys had to prepare the calculations they needed solving and then book a time on the computer! Another innovation was the introduction of the Telex machine where we could send typed messages to clients. Its main set back was the noise it made typing the text and sending and for this reason had to be kept in a closed 1m x 1m room. But then came the fax where we could send sketches. And now e-mail and 3D models !!!!!!!!!

When the 1990 recession hit us, we had been through two previous ones, I thought we needed to look for work outside Australia and headed off to the USA and cold knocked on doors. I received a few knock backs but with a couple of positive hearings I opened an office in Sacramento, California, 10 years later we moved this office to Phoenix, Arizona. Bear in mind the logistics of that time. Drawings had to be shipped from Australia to the US by courier and took a number of days. But by offering quality work and keeping deliveries it went from success to success.

In the early 1990’s CAD systems became available and I was keen that we stay up to date with all the new programs being offered. I firmly believed this was to be the future and we tried several software programs. In 1995 I sent Kerry Lindemann and Wayne Morrison on a trip overseas to see what was available. They went to the USA, UK and France.

A former employee and manager of our Melbourne office, Lorraine Conetta, at the time was working for a fabricator in Kuala Lumper, Malaysia, and called me to say she was using a program called X-Steel and thought it was by far the best 3D CAD system she had seen. It came from the UK. Kerry and Wayne were still over there so I made an appointment for them to visit the offices of CSC Computing. After seeing the performance of X-Steel software they were excited and suggested I get to the UK to see it for myself.

This I did and negotiated a deal where BDS would purchase a large number of licenses and be given the dealership for X-Steel in the Asia-Pacific area.

As the largest licensee of X-Steel in the world at that time we had the opportunity for input to Tekla in its ongoing development of what became the pre-eminent 3D package in the world. Tekla was extremely committed to this work.

When I sold the business in 2007 we had 8 offices in 7 countries. Brisbane, Auckland (NZ), Oxford and Nottingham (UK), Vancouver (Canada), Phoenix (USA), Bangkok (Thailand) and Chennai (India). After the business was sold to DBM in 2016 they subsequently acquired PDC in Perth and Candraft in Vancouver, Canada. The new organisation, DBM Vircon, employs over 800 detailers worldwide. It is still headquartered in Brisbane.

We took pride of engaging 2 or 3 cadets each year and training them in the ways we were taught at EDCO – a training system second to none. The most critical attribute in selecting a cadet was their ability at Maths. They were the days when detailers had to be experts in trigonometry and geometry and most of all they took great pride in their hand printing (copybook style), an art that has been lost these days. In the early 80’s there was a serious shortage of detailers and combined with our workload we were able to employ detailers from South Korea and the Philippines as temporary immigrants who in time became Australian citizens.

We were not the first steel detailing company in Australia but we certainly led the evolution of the industry from horse and buggy to jet engine.

Thanks must also go to the dedicated BDS employees in perfroming and delivering a quality service for our clients worldwide. One other matter that gives me great pride is knowing that several of the guys who were trained at BDS eventually started their own businesses.

I could never have accomplished what we have without the support, commitment and loyalty of Geoff Graham, Chris Bellis, Brad Backer, Kerry Lindemann, Peter Harper and Cam Elms. They were my confidants and kept the wheels turning. I also owe special thanks to Brian Donaldson (Auckland), Vaughan McClear (Bangkok), Ian Belcher (Oxford) and Wayne Morrison (Pacific Computing).