KARACHI: They are like heavy industrial machines but they are not in factories in the big industrial areas of Karachi such as Korangi or SITE. You can find them in little shops around Ramaswami, Garden, Saeed Manzil, Old Golimaar and even the back streets of Tariq Road.

Men in dark shops with hands and faces stained with grease work on them to manufacture small parts for motorcycle, car, truck or generator engines while taking care of other things such as cutting holes in metal, grinding to smoothen the rough edges in crankshafts, cylinder bores, pistons, etc. There are lathe machines, drilling press and boring machines, milling machines, chain pulley blocks for lifting heavy stuff, etc.

Being located in commercial areas and not proper industrial areas of the city, these small workshop owners deal with all kinds of issues faced by the other shops, the biggest of them being loadshedding. “We remain without power for three two-hour breaks. But the work has to go on, too. We try working around this issue. When there is no power, we use generators to run our machines or that time we utilise in doing other work where the hands are needed more than the machines,” says Rais Ahmed, who is in charge of one such workshop at Ramaswami.

All such small workshops also don’t do the same kind of work. “Though we all fix moving parts in engines, we repair and make generator parts, they do the same for motorcycles and rickshaws,” explains Ahmed while pointing to a similar workshop right across his.

The workshops do as much work inside their shops as they do outside on the pavements. “It’s cooler outside, especially when we don’t have electricity,” he points out.

“We are not car garages, mind you,” explains Saeed Ahmed, owner of another such workshop near the Radio Pakistan building at Saeed Manzil.

“See, garages have mechanics, we are machinists,” he says. “Still the garages cannot survive without us and we look to them for business. The mechanics open up the engines coming to them for overhauling or repair or reconditioning. And when they need to replace a part or clean it up to make it as good as new, this is where they come,” he adds.

Asked why not just replace parts, Mohammad Khalid at Garden shakes his head and smiles. “Years of use may make crankshafts rough. You need a grinder to smoothen the opening in order to allow the oil to pass through easily and help the engine run smoothly. Now repairing and reconditioning from here may cost you something around Rs6,000 while a new one will be Rs15,000 or more,” he reasons.

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2015

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