Page 232 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Left to right: Tier 2 Repower in San Leandro shop (L-R) Dave Dickinson and Dave Williams; Entire team (L-R) Rick Ackerman, Dave Dickinson, Ron Spencer, Rick Licon, Dave Williams, Howard Borgeson
It requires extensive modification and customizing to make it all work. Cat supplied the Tier 2 engine and all the related parts; we did the engineering and put it all together.”
“These are massive three-hundred-hour jobs,” ex- plained Gjerman back then.1 “Much of it is made up as we go. We’re not only converting a machine from a mechanical to an electronically-controlled engine. We also have to adapt the intake system to an air-to-air after-cooling system. On one of the early pilot machines, we put in an engine and
took it back out ten times to figure out what it needed and get all the parts to fit right,” says Gjer- man. “We provided each [shop] bay with a digital camera so they could document the whole process. When it was finished, we supplied Caterpillar with a packet of pictures, notes, and drawings of the parts we fabricated or modified, plus a parts list. Then they put it all into a special instruction format.” Today, Caterpillar acts as a clearinghouse for repower information between the California dealers and anyone else who wants to upgrade to a new-tiered Caterpillar engine.
Some of Peterson’s 335 service vehicles that must comply with EPA regulations
1 Some twin-engine scraper repowers took over 1,000 hours to complete.
230 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG