VETERANS IN THE
MODERN AGE
SDIIIHWARD ENGINEERING is a colour-
ful establishment.
If you enter the factory from the
north, you pass a ileet of retired
Wellington tramcars.
If you enter via the production
zone, you might see steel tube emerg-
ing from high-frequency induction
welding rigs at speeds of around 200
feet per minute.
If you’re shown in by way of a small red door open-
ing olf Port Road, you pass the gleaming dignity and
mechanical intricacy of New Zealand’s biggest private
collection of veteran and vintage motor cars.
The obvious contrasts reflect the interests of Mr Len
Southward, former water-speed personality and now a
well-known figure in the world of old-car enthusiasts,
and his son Roy, who is president of the Wellington
branch of the Vintage Car Club of New Zealand.
The main story of Southward Engineering Company
Limited, however, is its high place among the manu-
facturing industries at Seaview, Lower Hutt’s major
industrial zone.
The company makes some 30 dilferent types of rear-
vision mirrors-for motor-cycles, cars and commercial
vehicles-under the “Lesco" trademark, it produces
tangent-spoked pram wheels in diameters from six
inches to ten inches, it markets the “Pour-a-Can" fuel
container which is made under Swiss patent licence, and
the firm is New Zealand’s major manufacturer and
supplier of muiflers and exhaust pipes to the motor-car
assembly plants for original equipment and replacement
parts.
From the Southward Engineering mills come vast
quantities of light-wall tube formed from English steel
in a range of diameters from Q-inch to 2;-inch. Square
tube is also produced in steel, and the same round-tube
sizes are made in aluminium.
The tube mills have been steadily developed to their
present level of eificiency over the past 20 years, and
their primary product appears in many hundreds of
applications through secondary manufacture throughout
New Zealand.
Flat steel strip entering high-frequency induction welding rig.
The company, which operates in conjunction with its
sales division-New Zealand Tube Mills Limited~grew
from small beginnings as a motor garage, Southward
Motors, in Kent Terrace, Wellington. ln 1939 manu-
facturing of mutflers, rear-vision mirrors and pram
wheels was started in a small building in Lloyd Street,
and expansion in later years saw the firm move to its
first site at Gracefield.
Here, in 1958, one of the Hutt Valley's most spec-
tacular industrial fires burned the firm out and it
transferred to the present four-acre site the same year.
The factory area is 60,000 square feet, excluding the
“car museum” which houses Mr Southward‘s collection
of 40 veteran and vintage cars.
Machine bending tube for exhaust pipe.
Back 
