Adelaide industrial firm FCT the designer and builder of torches and cauldrons for Olympics Games from 2000

Adelaide Industrial combustion company FCT Flames at Thebarton took on the challenge of making Olympic torches and cauldrons in 2000.

An Adelaide company designed, built and tested torches and cauldrons from 2000 for the Olympic Games, including Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

FCT Flames, an industrial combustion company based at suburban Thebarton, took a bold new direction – from designing burners for cement factories ­– in the leadup to the 2000 Sydney Olympics.  When Cathy Freeman lit the Sydney Olympic cauldron, produced by FCT Flames, it was a game-changing moment for the Adelaide company.

Since then, no challenge proved too great for the company, including designing a torch to be used underwater at the Great Barrier Reef and a six-metre-high tornado-style flame used at the Youth Games in Singapore.

But the company ranked its “burning man”, created for the opening ceremony of the European Games in Baku. as its most challenging project. The burning man's outline was created with 600 metres of pipe fitted around a moving stage and the effect was sequenced so that fire spread from the heart out along the man's arteries. There was extensive design and testing done in an Adelaide workshop before it took a team six weeks to install the effects in the Baku stadium.

FCT Flames’ small team included mechanical, electrical and process engineers, electricians, gas fitters and technicians. It took a hand-drawn sketch or a computer-generated image and turned it into something real.

With billions of people watching the flame lighting, there were no second chances. To make sure things go without a hitch, the team had back-up systems, multiple gas paths and back-up power supplies. It was mportant that the look was right, the safety was right, the performance right and the fuel consumption understood.