Surging ahead
Conrad’s Garage was a big Holden (and Chevrolet, Pontiac, Vauxhall and Bedford) dealer in Nowra on the NSW South Coast. Conrad’s was the kind of old-school place that would be unrecognisable in today’s car dealership landscape, with a large workshop that employed about 20 mechanics and apprentices. When it came to servicing and repair work, the only things Conrads couldn’t handle in-house were crankshaft grinding and cylinder boring.
For a youngster like Ron Gillard in the early 1960s, Conrad’s Garage was the ideal place to get a well-rounded apprenticeship – notwithstanding the fact that he didn’t get along with his supervisor.
“The foreman didn’t like me because I didn’t play football and I didn’t go drinking beer with them, and I was a wheezy little asthmatic,” Gillard says. “He used to give me all the shit jobs, all the way up to about my third year.”
That was 1963, when Conrad’s Garage began proudly displaying the new EH model Holden in its showroom.
“The rst 179 EHs had a tuning problem,” Gillard remembers. “They used to surge at about 45mph, which is a bad speed to have a surge problem. Anyway, a few of my mates bought these and I stuffed around with them after work, hotting them up and doing all sorts of things, and I got stuck into the carburettor and distributor on one mate’s EHs, an automatic, and I xed the surge problem.
“One of Conrad’s biggest customers was Johns & Waygoods, who used to make weighing scales and stuff. We used to sell them all their cars. Their manager had a brand new 179 Premier, and it was a bad surger. None of our guys could x it. I went up to the service manager and told him I knew how to x it.”
The service manager was new to Conrad’s, brought in to override the foreman. Fortunately the new workshop chief didn’t share the foreman’s disdain for Gillard.
The service manager wanted to know how the third-year apprentice knew the x to a problem none of their experienced mechanics had yet been able to solve. Gillard replied that he had gured it out working on a couple of his mates’ EHs.
“‘You’re not bullshitting me, are you?’ he said to me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s the car,’ he said, ‘take it away and x it.’ So I did.
“He really liked me after that. Instead of having to do all the shit jobs, he gave me my own work bay and had me doing pre-delivery work on new cars. He also sent me to training schools – Holden, Chev, Rochester carbies, all sorts of things. He made me – he was one bloke, John Collinson was his name, who changed my whole life around.”