Steel Construction Vol 40 No 3 - Mining, Industrial, Import/ Export | Page 12

SAISC FEATURE
Why Engineering?
My late father Bert Erling in 1948, by taking
over the debts, bought Speedy Welders. And
they did precisely that, welding repairs and
the like. His experience before that had been
in structural steel fabrication with Sydmor
Engineering (Later to become Power Steel
and after that Genrec). So once he had
made some profit (he described his jobs as
75% profit in the early days) he bought a
Peddinghaus punch and shears and was back
into the structural business. My older brother
Michael was the sibling who wanted to work
in the business, but when he flunked out of
engineering at Wits, my future was kind of
pre-ordained for me.
This between 1963 and 1966 I read for and
completed a B SC in Civil engineering at Wits.
I was lucky enough to get a job at Dorman
Long Africa (Later Dorbyl, DSE and now
Aveng Fabrication) in their design office
under the doyen of the industry Tommy
(Bernard) Thompson. Amongst my mentors
in that office were Cameron Napier, Norman
Ellis and on the other side of my drawing
board was Alan Kemp who went on to
become Professor of structural engineering
at Wits. But after a year in that office the
Defence Force caught up with me and so in
1968 I found myself doing military service.
Once again luck was with me, after basic
training my engineering degree was
recognized and I was transferred to the
Professional Design Office which was a part
of the Quartermaster General’s department.
BELOW: Construction of the North end of the
International Conference Centre in Durban.

Working for another great mentor, Danie
Toerien I found myself working on a
whole series of secret projects, which was
great exposure and experience. My most
“important project” (certainly from the
military’s point of view) was to design and
supervise the building of the reinforced
concrete structure for the Services Golf club
house in Voortrekker Hoogte. This was my
only real exposure to reinforced concrete in
my career.
By this time Bert was nagging for me to join
Speedy Welders but agreed that I should do
an MBA before joining the company. The
year 1969 was spent at UCT with a class
many of whom have risen to business fame
such as Stewart Cohen (co-founder Mr Price),
Ian Kantor (co-founder Investec Bank), Mike
Levitt (went on to be the Chairman of Old
Mutual) and and and.
20 years at Speedy Welders
Having successfully completed the MBA
course, on 29 September 1969 I joined
Speedy Welders. I can safely say I did every
job description you can think of related to
the structural steel process, from sweeping
the floor, design engineer, detailed drawings,
machine operator, buyer, qc inspector, site
manager and the like through to Managing
Director. I might add that my first efforts at
project management was an unmitigated
disaster. We ran weeks and weeks late.
Talk about induction by fire, but what a
learning curve.
The projects that really stand out in my
memory from those days included major
steel works for the Sishen South plant, the
Sishen Saldanha export project (6 000 tons
of steel), President Brand uranium plant,
President Steyn 4 shaft, FSG 5 shaft, diamond
plants for Letseng and various de Beers
mines in Namibia, coal plants and conveyors
for New Denmark colliery and Tutuka Power
station, numerous plants for AECI (including
a replacement nitro-glycerine plant because
the existing one blew up.This was in answer
to a Sunday afternoon call at home,“Spencer,
please get another structure going like the
one you did a few years ago, we will let you
know when you can erect it...”).
On the commercial side we worked on many
shopping malls, Westgate, too many OK
Bazaars and Pick n Pay stores to mention. Sun
hotels were also great customers, we worked
on the Cascades at Sun City,Thabanchu Sun,
River sun and and and.
The lasting memory about the way we did
business in those days was how important
the hand shake was. Relationships with your
customers was all important. We regularly

10 Steel Construction Vol. 40 No. 3 2016

received calls to come and collect a set of
drawings to urgently start on a project to be
erected some weeks ahead, with the final
word being “oh and by the way let me have
a price before you finish the job”. In most
of those cases we would have been paid in
full before (if ever) the written order was
received.
In 1979 Speedy Welders became a fabricating
member of the SAISC and I started to attend
meetings. I soon became a committee
member.
At our peak we were fabricating about 500
tonnes per month. I do not think we ever
posted an order to a steel merchant. Most
order numbers were “Verbal Spencer”. We
trusted and respected each other, which
made doing business with “friends” much
more fun.
One of our more exciting periods was in
1979 when we decided to invest in NC
controlled drill line and templating punch
machines. Once again we chose Peddinghaus
equipment. Visits to factories in Germany and
the USA to see this equipment on workshop
floors helped us make the right decision. All
our drilling information had to be keyed in to
the microprocessor through a key board on
the machine. We were so excited when the
machine drilled holes in 20 seconds (slow
compared to 3 seconds these days). Having
this entry level state of the art equipment
made us one of the best equipped medium
size fabricators in the industry.
At about the same time we bought our first
“Hewlett Packard” desk top programmable
calculator (a mini-computer in today’s
terms). Our co-director Billy Rimmer who
was an expert detailer and a good hand at
designing simple structures took to the HP
Basic language programming like a duck to
water. Between us we developed a program
for detailing floor beams. All be it one at a
time it was never the less much quicker than
by hand and was great to be involved in our
own CAD efforts. We even managed to sell
a few copies of the program, one finding its
way to Australia.
Not that we did not have our bad contracts.
A 1983 /4 project, which shall remain
nameless, ended up in a claim situation
amounting to R1.5 million, an enormous
amount of money in those days. Our client
repudiated the claim and forced us to go the
arbitration route. Our clients were masters
at delaying tactics and managed to delay the
arbitration for well over 2 years, and literally
on the steps going to the arbitration they
made us an offer to settle. Bert who had
long before lost the appetite to continue the
fight agreed to settle for way below what