Hard-Working Bling

James Laster's Journey - From Landfill to Award-Winning Mechanic

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It all started at a county landfill in Mary- land, where James Laster Jr.’s father was a heavy equipment operator.

The younger Laster loved to take things apart, first noted on his fifth Christmas morning, when he disassembled rather than played with many of his toys.

When this fascination with taking things apart progressed to the family’s appliances, Laster’s father began bringing home discarded items from the landfill to satisfy his son’s curiosity.

As the younger Laster grew older, on Saturdays he would help his father do maintenance and repairs on the equipment at the landfill. Sometimes a Caterpillar field service technician and service truck were on site working on equipment. Laster fell in love.

“That mechanic and his service truck— that was it for me,” recalled James Laster Jr., now 47 years old. “From then on, I wanted to be a field mechanic.”

Laster took four years of power mechanics and welding in high school and was a certified welder by graduation. Ever practical, he went to night school for diesel mechanic training and worked as a welder for a Komatsu dealer during the day. He said that sometimes they’d send him out with a field mechanic to weld equipment in the field.

“Going out and working on equipment in the field was like heaven to me,” he said.

 “When I hired on after tech school graduation with a John Deere construction and forestry dealership, I told them I wanted to be a field tech. I had to spend a month or two in the shop, then got a truck, and I was where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do.”

Laster has worked on Deere equipment for the past 19 years, most recently for JESCO in Maryland. He worked his way through five service trucks, constantly improving, in his mind, his design for the perfect service truck.

His latest effort at reaching that goal is a 2015 Kenworth T370 equipped with a 14-foot Maintainer service body and a 10,000-pound-capacity Maintainer crane with 25 feet of reach.

He uses a Miller 325 Trailblazer for welding. A Vanair Air-N-Arc ALL-IN- ONE Power System provides compressed air, electric generation, 12/24-volt jump/ boost capability, and a backup welder.

“There’s no PTO on the truck,” he runs things, so I don’t have to let the truck sit and idle.”

A sliding, hinged cover over the center bay allows access to jack stands and cribbing, as well as a portable hydraulic hose crimper, a Milwaukee portable band saw, and a Milwaukee mag drill. A one- inch-drive Milwaukee pneumatic impact wrench and a full set of one-inch drive sockets ride in a side compartment.

Although looks-wise the truck was perfect, Laster added a few personal touches to better fit his needs in the field.

“I welded some hooks and brackets in the compartment under the crane to hold my chains, hooks, and stuff,” he said. “I got some Lawson drawer sets and custom fit them into the tall double-door cabinet in front of the right rear wheel well. That’s my hardware and parts compartment for bolts, hydraulic fittings, o-ring assortments, and all the accessory stuff. I welded that Lawson cabinet into the compartment so it wouldn’t fall out every time I pulled open a drawer.”

However, the biggest and most visible changes made to the JESCO-owned truck were performed by Laster in an effort to achieve a certain “look.”

“It took time to find the right pieces, but I think I’ve got it looking pretty close to the way I want it to look,” he stated.

“My wife and I polished it up last year and took it to a truck show and won ‘Best of Show’ in the Service Truck Class.”

Tasteful but eye-catching touches were added to the truck—with his employer’s permission—including a chrome drop bumper, a chrome windshield visor, chrome steps, and a chrome visors and bezels on all the gauges in the instrument panel.

Lester’s truck also comes with an array of dual-color marker light strips under the cab doors, along the bottom of the service body, and up the front corners of the service body make the truck a show-stopper at night.

“The lighting definitely gets people’s attention when I pull into a job site after dark and flip a switch, so all the running lights change from orange to green,” Laster said. “We’ve pretty much chromed everything that can be chromed without making it gaudy.

“I don’t know if it’s good or bad,” he chuckled, “but the guys at John Wayne Chrome Shop in Greencastle (Pennsylvania) know both me and my wife by our first names.”

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2023 issue of Service Truck Magazine.