Paul Kay (b. 1954)
Engineering patternmaker & second-generation patternmaking business owner, surfer, artist. Sydney
Apprenticed in engineering patternmaking 1971-74
I’ve been in patternmaking all my life, never done another job at all. I mean, they talk about people having, let’s say 10 or 15 years ago, that people might have had 3, 4, 5, 6 jobs in their life. I’ve only had one. So I do view myself as being a bit different.
My first impression is, it wasn’t technology that was affecting us, it was people’s decision to manufacture overseas, to find cheaper labour sources. … So that was certainly doing Australian patternshops out of a job. […] I think once they had tried this idea of ‘let’s make it offshore’ then people started thinking ‘how can I still do this in Australia but in a cheaper, better way?’, and that’s when everyone looked a bit harder at what was going on in Europe and in the United States. It’s at that stage, perhaps the late 90s, early 2000s, when people really started to say, ok we’ve got to invest in technology, in digital machinery, in CAD drafting.
I didn’t believe that CAD would help me where I was at” [because of the organic forms and size of jube patterns.] “We started making the confectionery products in 1985 and to give you an example, early on in the piece, one of the more complicated pieces was a … baby with a head and body features. But it was only 23mm long and it had to be a certain volume and the customer said to me, ‘Look, do you think you could do this?’ And I just looked at it, and I’d been doing some wood carving things through my own interest, and I said, ‘I think so, yeah.’ And I think it was better than reasonably well. And I think they were ecstatic with that, and I never looked back after that.
Our client base, when you’re doing one-off shapes, when you’re doing one-off things it’s very difficult to warrant producing an item like that on CNC because it’s purely a one-off … There was not enough there, let’s say, forcing me to change and the client was still happy to meet the expense of me doing it traditionally.
Paul Kay’s interview is held with the National Library of Australia (not available online just yet, but it is available via Copies Direct or in person). You can hear ore about Paul Kay on the History Lab podcast Invisible Hands, and in this article in The Conversation.
Reshaping Australian Manufacturing 