Page 49 - Demo

Although the cranes have been set up primarily to support the company’s core marine work, they’re also in demand for a wide variety of other jobs, including lifting packs of wall linings to the top of high-rise construction sites
YOU CAN FIND SURPRISINGLY BIG AND on its own didn’t generate a steady cashflow.
well-equipped transport operations in
the most out-of-the-way places...but few as unexpected as the one that’s an integral part of Lyttelton ship repair, marine engineering and boatbuilding company Stark Bros.
The 60-year-old business has a lineup of 10 trucks and a dozen or more trailers, clearly placing it as a genuine part of the trucking industry.
More than that, it’s a fleet capable of extraordinary versatility, largely on the back of four crane trucks – the star of the group a 500 horsepower Volvo FM fitted with a Palfinger PK92002. It’s among the highest-capacity truck- mounted cranes around....and one of only two of its kind in New Zealand.
Naturally, carting working materials – and boats – back and forth is a necessary adjunct to the ship repair business, and once a company decides it doesn’t want to pay outside contractors, having
a few trucks is a logical next step. That was the decision arrived-at quite early on in the company’s history by Frank Stark, who at the age of 20 and just newly-qualified as a shipbuilder, decided to set up in business on his own.
However, commissions to build boats didn’t come along too regularly for the first few years,
so Frank diversified, explains his eldest son and company CEO Andrew: “When Dad started the business his passion lay in boatbuilding – but that
“So he and his staff poured concrete for paths and tank surrounds, maintained and inspected the fuel pipeline that ran across the hill from Lyttelton to Christchurch....in fact did anything needed to keep the company viable.
“And the business has grown ever since on that basis – we do what we have to do.”
Frank was one of five brothers, and over time
all of the others joined the enterprise – only one of them still active in the company. Ralph Stark, the company GM, started with the business in 1963 after first training as a shipwright, then going to sea for a time and gaining his chief engineer’s ticket.
Frank died in 2008 at 70 years of age, but his three sons work fulltime with the business – Andrew as CEO, Cameron as operations manager and Tim managing the marine activities.
Ralph recalls the 1960s as a period of rapid expansion for Stark Bros, and the development of the ship servicing and repair side, which intensified the need for a transport capability: “One of
the factors was the establishment of Lyttelton Engineering – formed by a breakaway group of workers from Sinclair Melbourne, at the time the major engineering company at the port.
“The new company wanted to continue concentrating on general engineering and asked us if we could help out with the transport work.
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