Coates Hire - Equipment Hire

Coates Hire - A water truck hard at it! Image provided by Coates Hire.

The water truck above and the scaffold tower below are just a quick glimpse of the range of hire equipment available from Coates Hire - Australia. They carry a range that suits many applications, from weekend DIY-ers doing home improvements to civil engineering companies building roads and bridges.

Coates Hire started off as an engineering company and later a machinery manufacturer in Melbourne in 1885. They are now Australia's largest Equipment Hire company. They have a presence in Indonesia with Coates Hire Indonesia and they service the global offshore oil and gas industries from their base in Aberdeen Scotland.

I did not realise it until this morning when was looking at Coates website that I used to own one of Coates earlier machines. It was a "Coates VibeRoll" which was a pedestrian roller. We used it for compaction of sub grade under concrete slabs. It was at least fifteen years old when I bought it, and it was still going strong when I sold it a few years later.
This type of machine was manufactured by Coates in the 1950's and they had the idea of "Try Before you Buy" to show off the product. This marketing idea must have worked because in no time the company formed a hire section and it appears that since then they have never looked back.

Coates Hire - An Aluminium lightweight and easy to handle scaffold tower. Image provided by Coates Hire.

I guess that for a period of say 30 years or so our small construction company had dealings with quite a few equipment hire firms. We only ever had a trading account with one of them, which was Coates Hire. They were the first truly professional hire company in our city (Darwin, NT) and they always were the first place to call when we needed something. Often if they didn't have an item available at the time they would get it in from elsewhere to keep us happy, even though we were a very small account.

Coates Hire - A memento from a past era, an old Furphy water tank on a modern trailer seen in the yard of the Darwin depot.

There is no doubt that Australia a hundred or so years ago was forced by it's distance from Europe to be self sufficient in many things and the small engineering firms of the time have an enviable reputation for inventiveness and producing machinery that could stand harsh conditions. Furphy and Sons was one of them. If you look closely at the lettering towards the bottom you may be able to make out this small verse.

It is a bit quaint and outmoded these days, but it seems to me that Coates Hire may still be hanging on to these old values.

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