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Austin Pipe Concepts Limited is continuing the family tradition; it is a privately owned Company with an experienced, well qualified and close knit team.

 

The original Austin Pipe Company started in the 1880’s as “Austin & Kirk” which produced general pottery ware. Later the company was to divide and the new Austin Pipe Company started producing earthenware pipes for sewer and storm water applications.

 

Len Austin, father of Lew, worked in the family owned company for fifty years of his life. At the beginning Len was to learn his trade making earthenware chimney pots; eventually he was to become the Production Manager but still had a very ‘hands on’ approach and worked alongside the other employees.

 

Lew remembers his dad taking him, together with his brother Steve, as children (from around six years of age) to the factory where the boys would work during school and Christmas holidays. The trade that Lew was to learn during his years at the factory, including making pipe, setting up and ‘burn’ the kilns (bringing up to heat); was to set him on his career path.

 

When he left the Company at twenty years of age he then became a hydraulics engineer involved in the irrigation pumping industry which used fibrolite and PVC pipe. He would design and produce hydraulic calculations for fluid movement through pipe which eventually lead him on to the waste water industry.

 

Lew has always been interested in pipe (“it’s in the blood”) together with pipe application and manufacture. During an overseas trip some five to ten years ago he saw technology that was revolutionary and that was already being used extensively in other developed countries in Europe and the United States of America. Lew immediately recognised the potential for the vertical drycast technology here in New Zealand and so the new chapter for Austin Pipe begins……