Some Brushes Are 12 Feet Long

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31107, 9 July 1966, Page 12

Some Brushes Are 12 Feet Long

Canterbury Industry

rspeciollp written for "The Preu" by DON GRADY) pEW industries do not use some components made by Bunting and Company, Ltd., of Christchurch.

The firm has been making brushes since 1895 and the plastics division of Buntings has now mushroomed into big business. The firm’s modem injec-tion-moulding and design and die-making services have expanded in the last 18 years. Through its wholly-owned subsidiaries, Bunting’s specialises in sheet fabrication, vacuum forming and fabrication of all types of plastic sheet From a subsidiary comes a complete range of expanded styrene products. Bunting’s brushes are “teethed” with pig bristle and the hair of horses, cows, goats and squirrels. Other brushes have heads fitted with palm and cactus fibres. An industrial brush for

washing big sheets of glass has bristles of crimped phos-phorous-bronze wire set into a kauri base nearly 6ft long. Brushes 12ft long are ordered by freezing works to clean tables or troughs. Batteries of brushes are used to clean the road tunnel’s ceiling and walls mechanically. Scientific Brush-making is scientific. Only mop-making has not dated. And mops today, with

more modern attachments, come in “wet” and “dry” versions. The white mop is for washing out, or mopping up. And the black mop is for dry-polishing. Though Bunting’s was founded in Christchurch and its head office and main manufacturing plant are here, the firm also has plants in Dunedin and Auckland. The total work-force of the wholly New Zealand-owned firm, is 360.

Rough lengths of unseasoned Southland beech that

come Into the firm’s yard are machined into the smooth polished wooden handles of brushes. Whirring machines each year cut up 500,000 board feet of beech into brush lengths. They trim it, shave it, and send each piece along from one department to another. At each stop, the brush gains shape. “Rumble Sealing’’ In one section of Bunting's where small paint brushes are made, a visitor will see a peculiar process, known in the trade as “rumble sealing.” Everything is tossed about in a drum and given a good shaking till its rough edges are smoothed. Another machine, a “flirting” machine, takes the loose bristles out of the head of a brush, leaving the brush-head clean. The picture shows the mixing of natural and synthetic fibres for bristles.