Page 205 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

We do what we say
We decided early on that we would do everything we could to not let them down. No matter what. We were determined to keep running right alongside them.
– Mike Coiner, Forest Products development manager, Peterson Machinery, Eugene
averaging fifty-four loads per machine—per day! When that trial period ended, Peterson took our machine into their shop to add all the new updates and left us with their upgraded model. We ran that for another three months. All at no charge. That was a very good month for us because we were working an exceptional piece of land, making product with two machines and only paying for one.”
Hiccups still happened, but it was getting noticeably better due to the persistence of the TFB-13 team.
The fact that Laird could call up Coiner or the Cat factory reps and get an answer in short order helped tre- mendously. So, too, was a pivotal decision by Peterson. “We decided, early on, that we would do everything we could to not let them down,” says Coiner, regarding a meeting with Jeff Goggin, then president of Peterson Machinery. “TRM was going to be our poster child for the feller buncher, and we would not let them down. No matter what. We were determined to keep running right alongside them.” That determination and perse- verance were finally paying off.
Then came that 2:00 a.m. phone call. “It was getting dark, and we had just finished installing another joystick after another failure,” explains Meline. “We were running behind, so I planned to go out and start bunching around one o’clock that morning until Chuck got there. But after working for only about forty-five minutes, that new joystick just fell apart in my hands. I was not a happy camper! The ironic thing was that the box those Parker joysticks came in had written on it in big bold letters: This is as good as it gets. Mike knew all about that because he’d delivered it to us the day before. By that afternoon, Mike had come out and got everything fixed, but you can bet that voice message made it all the way back to the factory in Georgia that same day. As I recall, it wasn’t long after that that Caterpillar quit using Parker joysticks. And we haven’t had a failure since.” Although he was madder than a hornet, Meline now laughs about it. “I’d be broke if we’d had to pay for everything that went wrong on that machine.”To their credit, Caterpillar picked up most of the tab, rounded out by Peterson. By the time it was all over, Cat had easily invested enough to have bought back that first Timberking . . . and then some.
In 2008, Meline traded in his old TK732 for a newer model—the Cat 532 feller buncher. By then it was dialed in much better and Caterpillar finally branded the machine a Cat. In 2012, Meline bought the much larger capacity 552 Series 1, which he says has been awesome. And in 2016, he bought a Cat 522.
Word of Meline’s success spread throughout the in-
dustry. Representatives from Finning—Cat’s largest
dealer, headquartered in Vancouver, British Colum-
bia—heard about Meline at the 2013 Oregon Logging
Conference and came out for a visit. They wanted to
see TRM’s feller bunchers at work in the woods using
Quadco saw heads. True to form, Meline was using a
28-inch Quadco head—the first of its kind—on his
Cat 552 Series 1 and making a bit more history.“Tony
is the guy when it comes to Cat feller bunchers,” says
Coiner. “He’s had them the longest—and stayed with it. People come from all over the Pacific Northwest and Canada to see his machines in action before they buy. He’s the Cat feller buncher poster child.” Today (2019), Tony Meline owns three feller bunchers: two 552s and one 522. And fifteen years after that first demo, he’s really happy he stuck with them.
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