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All-Australian Exhibition 1929

The Victorian Chamber of Manufacturers held an “All-Australian Exhibition” in Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building between 14th September and 9th November, 1929. The previous exhibition in 1924 was visited by 500,000 people (1).

The exhibition was opened at 3pm by then Premier Sir William McPherson on Saturday 14th September. (2) Exhibits included an aeroplane, clothing, pianos, boot polish, spark plugs, water taps, and a myriad of other products. The Working Man’s College and another dozen technical schools exhibited (3). Many well known names were present among the 142 exhibitors, such as Kiwi Boot Polish, H.V.McKay, Aspro, BHP, ICI, Sanitarium, and of course, W. G. Goetz & Sons!

W. G. Goetz & Sons exhibited at Stand 48, promoting “Power pressing machines”
Click images for larger view.


W.G. Goetz & Sons listing. The Argus, 13 September 1929, p. 16

Goetz Stand location (circled). The Argus, 13 September 1929, p. 15

Below: A souvenir lapel pin from the exhibition, 23mm diameter. 
An individual number for each visitor?

 

(1) Examiner, Launceston, Tas, 25 July 1929, p. 7
(2) The Argus, 13 September 1929, p. 13
(3) The Argus, 3 October 1929, p. 13

Sealing Pliers, W. G. Goetz & Sons logo

Seal embossing pliers are commonly used to make an impression on to a soft metal seal such as lead, to seal a wire tie on some part of machinery that customers and users are not supposed to access and tamper with, either for safety or warranty reasons. These pliers have a simplified version (one ‘G’ instead of two) of the W. G. Goetz & Sons logo in mirror-image relief on a pair of removable metal pads.

Click images for larger versions

Sealing pliers – overall length about 230mm

A pair of opposing jaws has the W.G. Goetz & Sons logo in mirror-image relief on each of the 13mm diameter metal pads. Impressions made with the pliers would have the logo the correct way around.

Each pad is held in place with a screw

Diagram demonstrating the logo on the pliers and the resulting impression.
Due to practical limitations of the tool, the logo on each pad of the pliers is a simplified version, featuring a single letter G, instead of the two on the full logo.

The full logo with two letter G’s

80B End Wheel Power Press

According to the Goetz Catalogue, the Model 80B End Wheel Power Press is “Ideal for punching, blanking, shearing and forming operations”, …and making horseshoes!

A variant, the 80BG, was also available for use with heavier gauge metals.

Thanks to Ben Embury from Embury Forge of Shelbourne, near Bendigo VIC, for the following photos of his 80B. Ben’s dad Peter set up their machine to make souvenir horseshoes, making all the dies/punches himself. Ben continues to use the 80B to make horseshoes, selling them all around Victoria.

Ben had the flywheel off to do maintenance work on the brake system and sent the following photos. Also below are the Goetz catalogue pages for the Model 80B. Click here to download the four catalogue pages as a PDF, or click the thumbnail image below.

Click photo images below for larger versions 

Front

Flywheel prior to removal

Flywheel removed, revealing crankshaft and clutch

The horseshoe jig and horseshoes

Branding and lubrication plaque

Visidex rotating card files

Back before the days of electronic devices for keeping track of business contacts, rotating card file devices such as Rollodex and these Visidex were popular.

These three Visidex card files from W. G. Goetz and Sons were slavaged from somewhere by Melbourne based documentray photographer Warren Kirk and donated to W. G. Goetz History.  Thanks Warren!

The date is unknown, but as the phone numbers have only 7 digits, they probably date up to the mid 1990s, when the 8th digit was introduced, but many card entries appear to be much older.

Below: Label on one directory featuring phone numbers for W. G. Goetz, Goetz Manufacturing, Eastern Metallurgical Founders (Dandenong), Goetz own phone number (Spotswood) and the direct number for the General Manager (those numbers have an older 391 Spotswood prefix).

Similar label on another of the Visidex files

The three Visidex files contain hundreds of contact names, addresses and phone numbers, many from large comapnies such as BHP, CIG Gasses, Containers Limited, Gadsen, Edgell, Nestlé, GMH and many others.

These examples are from RVB Products (see the RVB entry regarding their involvement with Goetz) and Ansett Technologies.