The History of CAMCO

Camco has a long and rich engineering and entrepreneurial heritage, which can be traced back to the late 1700’s, when a certain Benjamin Blackman started a business manufacturing candles from tallow in Southwark, London, UK. Benjamin’s direct descendants moved to NZ and were pivotal in setting up and managing the Hamilton Gas company in the late 19th century.

Fast forward to 1985, when a certain James (Jim) Henry Blackman entered the world. A hard and dedicated worker, Jim worked for the Post Office across a range of branches in the country. As time went on, he married Ivy Turley, (who’s descendants own a large metal fabrication business in the Wellington area to this day), and had eight children, including Colin and Dennis (who would be the father of Phil, who founded Camco. More on that later).

Showing a conscientious work ethic as they grew up, Colin and Dennis entered the trades; Colin becoming an engineering apprentice, and Dennis moving into the building trade. That entrepreneurial flair coming through, Colin soon moved on to starting his own engineering business in Cambridge called Hautapu Welders – still operational today. Colin developed a range of scoops that could be towed behind a tractor, which are the base of HW Industries lineup of products today.

As a carpenter, Dennis spent most of his working life constructing homes in the Napier & Cambridge areas. Dennis’ first son Phil joined the family in 1967 and was soon a valuable helper on the building sites, keeping an observant eye on all the trades going about their tasks.

Phil Blackman (Camco’s Founder) started off his working life manufacturing garage doors, before he moved to work for his Uncle Colin (remember him above?) at his engineering business. Thoroughly trained in the basics under the watchful eye of Colin, Phil soon showed his knowledgeable creative flair for quality workmanship, working on fabricating scoops, trailers, general machinery repairs, lathe work machining precision components, press brake operation, hydraulics and so on. At this time, he even built a flat deck tipper ute – perhaps the earliest “Camco” fitout we can lay claim to!

Armed with 11 years of precious engineering experience, Phil moved out on his own, starting an engineering business called Alvo Engineering, which specialised in high quality digger buckets, and developed a revolutionary tilt bucket design. Having repaired many tilt buckets over the years, he had a fair idea of the issues at hand. With the help of a mentor who owned a reputable hydraulic ram manufacturer(still in business today), Phil designed a twin-ram tilt bucket with superior geometry. This gave the ram 50% more leverage, decreased the stress on the bucket by 30%, and stopped the tilt mechanism bleeding back. At the time, the average 12-ton tilt bucket would do about 3000 hours a before an overhaul was required. Years after the business was wound up in 1999, Phil met a contractor at the local petrol station who told him he had purchased a second hand digger with an Alvo bucket fitted and it had done 10,000 hours without any major maintenance!

Phil later went on to work for a local glazing company, where he worked on site out of the back of a van, giving him valuable understanding of the experiences of tradies out in the field, sparking a passion to bring a solution to the challenges he faced on a daily basis – lost tools, hard to find gear, sore backs & knees and bonked heads, lost time scrambling in and out of the vehicles to find his gear.