Industry Players: Robin Box

This entry is part 4 of 26 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #4

If you ride adventure, chances are at some stage you’ve looked at, and possibly fitted, a Safari Tank. Safari Tanks owner Robin Box has a long history in off-road riding, and, something a lot of readers probably wouldn’t know, farming, canoeing and kayaking. Robin’s been offering high-quality product under the name of Aqualine Industries for quite a while, and like everything Robin does, it’s done with the throttle pegged wide open.

AdvR: What was your first bike?
RB: In 1979 I was a 19-year-old farm worker and jack-of-all-trades. I paid $400 for a second-hand TY250A. I had it road-registered, and I used to do quite long road trips on it. That was my bike for everything. Trials bikes in those days were a little more comfortable. I put a higher seat on it with a lot more padding, and it’d do nearly 100kph. That was also the bike I raced, and I had reasonable success.
The ITs and PEs were only just coming out then, and the courses were very difficult. The events I did win typically had an average speed of around 11 miles per hour. The TY was perfect. I just geared it as low as I could. You had to manhandle it up hills because the courses were so steep and rocky.
Later on they started opening up the enduro courses to suit the ITs and PEs and the trials bikes weren’t competitive.

AdvR: Were they big races?
RB: They were called ‘black’ events – events not sanctioned by the governing body – and they’d usually get a field of around 200 starters.It was actually one of those black events held near here that cost Jeff Leisk his Australian race licence. He was heading overseas at that same time, so it probably wasn’t a big issue for him.

AdvR: You moved on from the TY?
RB: I still have that TY250.It got modified over time and I ran a DT400 carburettor and DT250 barrel on it. You could just interchange things in those days.
But I ran that bike for quite some time. Then I bought my first brand-new bike: an XL500, the model with the 23-inch front wheel and no tacho. I had that until the single-shock Pro-Link XL500 was released. I traded the first XL for the Pro-Link model, then traded that on an XL600.
I started doing all my desert riding on that 600. It was the first bike I rode across The Simpson, and it’s the bike I rode down the Canning Stock Route.
I still have that bike, too.

AdvR: When was that?
RB: It was at the end of the last century. That sounds quite impressive, doesn’t it? I did all my exploring of the Victorian high country, and lots of road trips, on XLs. They were my ‘everything’ bike.

AdvR: You’re a fairly handy sort of bloke. What’s your trade qualification?
RB: I grew up on the farm doing a lot of agricultural work, and then I worked in building for a while. I did whatever work was around, really, mostly in the rural industry.
Then in 1987 I did four years of nightschool training in Melbourne. The study was in advanced composites – typically fibreglass, but carbon fibre and similar composites. I also did some extra training in passenger-jet aircraft composite repair.
It was 300km each way, and I’d get home at 1.00am. I did most of that travel on the XL.

AdvR: Crikey! What made you want to move from farm worker to high-tech jet-aircraft stuff?
RB: When I was in secondary school there was an exceptional teacher who had some fibreglass moulds, and we could build a fibreglass kayak in our lunchtimes. I did that when I was about 12 I guess, or maybe 13 years old. That was my introduction.
When I was in my early 20s I had the chance to get hold of some canoe moulds that were going to be thrown out. I made a bit of a hobby out of making canoes for a while, then it turned out that one of the moulds was a registered design of a quite desirable model. That’s what started Aqualine Industries in 1987.
I was still doing whatever work was available – building, the farm, I even worked in a winery – but that was when Aqualine kicked off.
In the very late 1980s or maybe early 1990s Holden started racing the VP and VN Commodores, and they had to homologate 500 models on the road before they were allowed to go racing them. We got the contract to supply the big boot spoiler.

AdvR: You were still riding the XL?
RB: Yes. The XL was the only bike I had up until 2000.

AdvR: How did building fuel tanks get started?
RB: We were manufacturing the slalom race kayaks for the Australian Olympic team. We did that for 12 years, and one of our kayaks won a silver medal. We still make kayaks and canoes, and we do a lot of fibreglassing for the caravan industry as well.

All along we’ve done all our own pattern making and model making, and the business evolved. In about 1998 we made a conscious decision to move into plastic canoes and kayaks. We could see that if you wanted to stay in the business you had to be able to produce plastic ones.

We had an agreement with a US company and we built our own moulding machine, and that was the start of the move to plastics.

Then when the XR650 was released, a chap bought the first one and wanted me to make a carbon-fibre fuel tank for him to use in the Australian Safari. I wouldn’t do it. I’d made composite tanks for roadrace bikes, but carbon fibre is way too brittle for off-road.

We had our own pattern-making facility, and we had the plastics, so we made a plastic tank for that bike. That was the first one we did. We made it just because we could. There was no commercial intention whatsoever.

Then, I think it was in 2002, the GHR Honda team was racing XR650s reasonably successfully. Andy Caldecott was their hot competitor at the time, and Honda contacted us and wanted to get some tanks because they’d had some durability issues with the tanks they’d been using. We didn’t do anything about it at the time, because I wasn’t going to sell anyone a tank that was unproven.

We had some discussion and eventually supplied some unbranded tanks to Honda.

The next year all the 400s and 450s came into the event, and Suzuki, KTM and Yamaha all approached us to do tanks so they could run their 450s. We supplied those tanks and that was really the start of it. Still none of them had any branding, and that’s how they came to be called ‘Safari Tanks’. All the tanks we were doing were being used in The Safari.

Not all product evaluation is rough going. A Touratech Companero suit on a BMW seems like a luxurious arrangement, but somebody has to do it.

AdvR: Did your personal experience as a rider help with the design?
RB: It’s from riding around in the desert ourselves that we knew the importance of extra fuel capacity, but also we knew to make sure the tanks were durable enough to cope with the corrugations and conditions out there. That’s what had us putting cross braces on anything bigger than 20 litres right from the start.

AdvR: You were mates with TK and you had him work there for a while. He had a good idea of what made a serious desert bike. Was he of any value as a researcher?
RB: Absolutely.
The more fuel he could get on a bike, and the further he could get away for longer, the happier he was. He was a real advocate of big tanks. The bigger the better. He didn’t worry about the inconvenience of the load, he just wanted the range.
He gave us some good input, and he gave us the confidence and encouragement to keep doing it.

AdvR: You’re the Touratech importer as well, and you have a fair stable of development bikes these days. With all that business going on, what’s left of Robin Box to go riding? When you do get a free Saturday morning, which bike do you grab and what kind of riding do you do?
RB: Most of my riding is adventure riding, and very rarely is it a Saturday morning.
I rarely go for half-days now. I ride a lot less often, but I ride for a lot longer when I do go.
We did the testing on the Husky 650 Terra ourselves, and we’re going to do a lot more of that development riding in future.
I always like to spend one week each year in Tasmania, and it’s usually on the adventure bikes. The TY doesn’t get dragged out any more, but the XL gets a run from time to time. I’m still paying the registration on it. It’s had a nice rebuild and it’s a great, reliable bike.
“My children have started riding too, now. They come adventure riding with me.”

To get to where you can stand and look out over the Great Australian Bight is a real-world test for any off-road product. The Safari tanks did it easy.

AdvR: As this issue hits the stands we’ll be with you for the next Touratech ride.
RB: Our second travel event!
I do ride when I can, but being part of other people’s adventures is what I get a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment out of now.

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