EDMO was started in the early seventies by the Mott family, and was initially named Storey Steel. They were not only selling steel, but also provided general fabrication and engineering services. It had 48 employees and was, at the time, probably South-East Queensland's largest workshop, particularly for heavy fabrication related activity. The business first achieved entry into the mining sector through winning the initial tender to build the Moura mine (QLD) workshops, which I believe is still standing today.
The next evolution was to get into specialised lifting solutions for heavy equipment, which is what you predominantly see as our core product today. These products were initially designed to aid in OTR tyre removal from Euclid haul trucks which had over 45-inch tyres on them. What the maintenance teams would do to get the tyres off, was back the trucks up onto two tree stumps to raise the rear wheels off the ground to remove them. It would take them a period of three days to remove the four tyres from the one truck. The original owners saw this activity and figured there's got to be smarter ways of doing this, so they designed and developed what was the first EDMO jack, called a BX style, which enabled the maintenance teams to swap the tyres in less than a day. Over time, the jacks use and acceptance became very wide spread on mine sites in Australia and globally, for multiple uses, not just tyres, due to simplicity of their operation and the robust design. In the late seventies-early eighties they diversified into larger equipment in the design, supply and manufacturing of tyre presses from 175 – 400 tonnes.
EDMO has been around for 54 years and has products across the four corners of the globe from India, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and the United States to name a few. That's a direct testament to the market leadership, product innovation and evolution of the engineering within the business, the passion for the product, the quality that we produce, and all the controls we put in place getting products fit for purpose, with the end user in mind. We've continued to focus on the end user requirements which help the tyre fitters and the maintenance technicians, to make their roles easier and remove them from the line of fire. That's been the ethos of this business since the seventies right up to today and will certainly be the ethos moving forward.