Oldest PDL Drive in Australia?

From left to right: PDL's National Sales Manager, Richard Scrivener shows ACL's senior project engineer, David Midgley, electrical project engineer, Colin Wing and PDL sales agent, Steve Lynch, from Gordon Wood & Co, the latest surface mount technology in the Napier manufacturing plant.

PDL Electronics Australia ran a recent competition to find the oldest running drive in Australia, with the grand prize being two people from the winning company flying to the manufacturing plant in Napier, New Zealand.
The winning company was ACL Bearing Company with a M7500 model with a serial number of S/N 119. ACL Bearing Company is Australia's sole manufacturer of precision engine bearings, and the largest manufacturer of powder metallurgy components in the country. The company supplies General Motors (Holden's Engine Company and Opel), and Ford, Toyota, and Mitsubishi.
The 1982 M7500 S/N119 is connected to 2 x 3kW motors running two cutting heads for a bush side facing machine allowing matched variable cutting speeds.
The success of this original project has led to a long association between ACL and PDL and the further fitting of another fifty eight drives onto production machines and another five on machines that have been exported as part of technology sales into China and India. ACL worked in close association with PDL to develop high frequency drive units for high speed cutting head applications that were not available at the time to the frequencies required - up to 500 Hz. ACL trialed five different motor control suppliers before it standardised on PDL for its motor controls.