Gold Rush Star Strikes Paydirt At Vegas Show

Even though he spent much of his time in the Bronze lot at ConExpo-Con/Agg 2017, Juan Ibarra found the experience to be as good as gold.

“Amazing,” said Ibarra, one of the stars of the Discovery Channel reality series, Gold Rush, on the second-to-last day of the show at the booth of Lincoln Electric on the Bronze lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center. “This is my first time ever at ConExpo. So there’s a lot to see here. I’ve been here all week and I’ve probably only seen a quarter of it.”

He brought the service truck he uses on the show, which is entering its eight season, to the Lincoln booth, where it displayed the new Air Vantage 600SD hydraulic four-in-one welder, generator, compressor, and pump.

The truck — a 1992 Peterbilt 379 chassis carrying a 1995 Aresco off-road mechanics body — looked in pristine shape, considering its age and that it has taken a pounding in the gold fields since Ibarra and his dad put the unit together some three years ago.

“Getting ready for the show (ConExpo) we put about two, three weeks worth of work trying to get it all cleaned up,” Ibarra said.

That included a new bed liner and some new equipment, such as the Air Vantage 600SD, which replaced a piston-driven air compressor and a 500-amp Lincoln Advantage welder.

“Now that I’ve had time to actually use it and work it since I’ve been back from ConExpo, there are not enough good things to say about that unit. It’s amazing,” Ibarra said in a follow-up phone interview from Oregon a month after ConExpo.

Based in Sun Valley, Nevada, he was scheduled to begin shooting the eighth season of Gold Rush, and his third season on the show, about a week later in Colorado.

Tractor-trailer converted for service

The Peterbilt was originally a tractor-trailer rig that he acquired about seven years ago. “It was a tandem axle dirt hauler that I repurposed and made into a service truck,” said Ibarra, who was one of the mechanics profiled in a feature on the show that ran in the July-August 2016 edition of this magazine. He bought the box about three years ago and married it to the truck just before his gig on Gold Rush began. The rig also has a new 8,000-pound capacity HC-8x crane from Auto Crane.

Aresco bodies are still made, although the Idaho-based company was sold several years ago and is now called Ground Force Worldwide, Ibarra noted. The structure of the box is quarter-inch steel with everything else, including the doors, made of 10-gauge steel, he said.

“It’s just a tremendous box, but it’s super heavy.”

The same might be said of ConExpo.

“It surpassed my expectations to be honest,” Ibarra said of the show, which he had heard about but never been able to attend until this time. “There’s a lot here, a lot of good vendors, a lot of interesting things to see, a lot of great things for our industry.”

A “fantastic show”

John Wasko, product manager of engine-drive welders for Lincoln Electric, said ConExpo was a “fantastic show” for his company. “I think a lot of that attention has been directed to this machine,” he said, referring to the Air Avantage 600SD hydraulic. A four-in-one engine-driven unit, it offers 600 amps of DC multi-process weld output, 20 kilowatt of three-phase generator output, 12 kilowatts of single-phase generator output, and also 60 cubic feet per minute of 100 pounds per square inch air compressor capability, he said.

“And what’s new about this machine is that it now gives you the ability to run hydraulics off of it,” Wasko said. “So it’s supplied with a Parker Hannifin 10-gallon per minute 3,000 psi hydraulic pump.”

He spent most of his show time at the booth promoting the unit. However, he did see enough of ConExpo to declare that “it’s overwhelming” and “massive.”

“I haven’t ventured out that far but from what I hear, it’s quite a sight to see,” Wasko added.