Barrels rolling out

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33422, 2 January 1974, Page 11

Barrels rolling out

Container shipping and higher standards of hygiene have overtaken a cooperage at Marton, and Fave meant the end of an era in barrelmaking.

At the height of the demand for barrels a few years ago. the cooperage employed 10 men turning out the material for 23,000 barrels a year. Outside the small factory almost a million feet of white pine was stacked 20 feet high for air-drying.

The final product was casks in “shook” formbarrel staves, tops and hoops for shipment to North Island freezing works. There, coopers employed by the works put the shook together as 80 gallon barrels for packing lamb pelts and sausage casings for export, says the house journal of the Fletcher group of companies, which owns the cooperage.

Now the staff of the Marton firm is down to four men. Freezing works are now shipping lamb pelts on pallets which can hold two and a half times as many pelts as the casks, and which completely fill the square and oblong containers. Hygiene regulations now demand that sausage casings be packed in casks made of inert, non-porous, non-react-ing material such as steel or plastic. The factory is already making smaller casks and planter tubs for nursery centres and shops, and small wine barrels for display counters in wine shops. With the demand for domestic wine soaring it is hoped that a market for barrels for storing and ageing wine will be found. These barrels would be made from Australian sheoak wood which, unlike white pine, is not porous. As a sideline, the factory supplies wood shavings to a

Palmerston North bacon plant for smoking hams. Fletcher Timber bought the cooperage, then Cooks cooperage in Palmerston North, in 1953. After a move to Petone in 1954, the company was transferred to Rotorua in 1958 to be near supplies of white pine. Nearness to supply, however, did not mean the factory was in a convenient place for delivery to meat works. In 1959, the cooper-; age was moved to Marton,; halfway between Wanganui; and Palmerston North.