ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE West
It’s 5pm on a Wednesday when I arrive at the Henderson Valley Road premises to meet with Eric Livingstone. Before we can get to the chat that will turn into this article, though, there is a bit of housekeeping he and the boys must attend to.
“I won’t be long,” Eric says, as tools are returned to their drawers, fasteners are arranged, and the boys mop the floors.
No doubt the same thing happens at workshops across the country, but, for some reason, it strikes me that, at the end of every working day for the past 30 years, the West Auckland Engine Reconditioners shop has been tidied and reorganized. That singular attention to detail — the level of care being put into the shop — is clearly reflective of that put into the team’s day-to-day work, and no doubt part of the reason that Eric and his team are still practising their craft all these decades down the track.
NZV8: Hi Eric, congratulations on making it to 30. Could you tell us a little about how West Auckland Engine Reconditioners started all those years ago?
Eric Livingstone: I started the business in 1990; it was an engine reconditioner that had gone out of business and a silent partner and I bought the equipment and started up. That was on Keeling Road [around the corner from the current shop]. In 1992, we bought this building, built the front section into a workshop, and moved all the equipment in.
Were you always in the engine-reconditioning business, or were you doing more general mechanical work back in those early years?
We’ve always specialized in V8s, and my background was always in the performance side of things — I used to build a lot of engines and transmissions for friends, and in the [Putaruru] dealership. I started with Chrysler when I was 12 years old, in spare parts — just cleaning and putting stuff away and looking after it — and they offered me an apprenticeship when I was 15. I took the apprenticeship on, and they made me the foreman when I was 20 and then the service manager when I was 21. I was with Chrysler probably until ’81.
When Todd Motors knew I was
