When Andrew McKenzie said he, his partner Ryan Gibson, and eight employees at McKenzie Diesel, Ltd. specialize in servicing and repairing heavy equipment at remote locations, he wasn’t kidding.
“Last winter Ryan and I had to repair a Winter Road groomer (used to prepare and maintain ice roads across frozen lakes) that was broke down on the ice,” explained the 31-year-old based in Winnipeg. “They’d broke the front end completely off it.
The ice wasn’t thick enough yet for even a pickup truck, so we loaded one of our Lincoln welders and a road box on a toboggan behind a snowmobile and went out and fixed it. We’ve done so many repairs in strange places that it didn’t seem that unusual to us.”
It also doesn’t seem unusual for McKenzie employees to see a helicopter with a sling dangling underneath it delivering to their work site special-order parts or a job box full of special tools.
“If we need special, big tools or rush-order parts, we’ll load them on an airplane, fly them as close as we can to the job site, then either deliver them with a pickup or fly them in with a helicopter. Whatever it takes to get the machine back together and running.”
McKenzie frequently works on big hydraulic shovels like the Hitachi 3600 and Komatsu PC 7000, as well as P&H 2800 rope shovels—big machines that demand fast repairs when they go down.
“We run multiple shifts out of each truck when we’re on a job site,” he said. “Day and night, somebody is working out of each truck. We’ve been doing this sort of specialized, fix-it-anywhere work for three years, and in that time it has grown from just me to 10 people. There’s a lot of demand if you do good work. We’ll work anywhere in Canada.”
At the time of this interview with Service Truck Magazine, he was 2,000 miles from home, and had just come off his truck’s night shift at 7:30AM.
McKenzie Diesel’s service trucks are designed for “anywhere” work. McKenzie’s personal truck is a 2007 Kenworth T300 sporting a 14-foot-long IMT (Iowa Mold Tooling Co.) Dominator service body. The body mounts an IMT 5225 crane with 10,500 pounds of maximum capacity and 25 feet of reach. The truck’s pto hydraulically powers an IMT air compressor with 43 cfm capacity. Two full sets of ball-bearing drawers featuring IMT’s “grab-and- pull” drawer releases fill the front, left compartment. Three of McKenzie’s trucks currently carry Lincoln Electric Ranger welder/generators.
The left-side compartment over the rear wheel carries ¾” and 1” sockets and drives, along with a 2,000 lb/ft capacity Rad Gun from TorcUp.
“We’ve got a Rad Gun that will torque up to 6,000 lb/ft at the shop,” he stated. “Since we share it between trucks, we coordinate between trucks when and where to use it. The same goes for our 100-ton track prep tool. That kit weighs 1,000 pounds, so we only take it when we know we’ll need it.”
The bed of McKenzie’s truck carries a job box loaded with his crane’s rigging gear, slings, and chains. A portable kerosene/diesel-fueled “torpedo” heater also rides in the bed.
“It’s an 80,000 BTU heater,” he noted. “Run a heat sock from the heater to the oil pan on a machine, and a half hour later that engine is warm enough to crank and start.”
Two Wabasto heaters keep things warm on the truck itself. One is a diesel-powered engine block heater. The other is a diesel fueled heater mounted under the passenger seat.
“The diesel-powered heaters keep things warm when we’re on a remote site where there aren’t any outlets for power cords,” McKenzie related. “The other trucks also have Wabasto heaters warming up the tool compartments. We had to put my truck into service before I got a Wabasto heater installed to heat the tool compartments, but we’ll definitely have one in that truck before next winter.”
Because it’s tough to predict every tool that will be needed on remote job sites, McKenzie and his crew often fabricate their own tools rather than wait on special tools to arrive.
“Last winter I was doing injector sleeves on a C7 Cat engine and broke the Cat factory tool. I ended up making my own sleeve tool with a 1-1/4” tap, some redirod and some other bits and pieces. It worked pretty good. You get used to doing what you have to do to get the job done, and after while it’s just part of business-as-usual out in the bush.”
