Page 271 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

The reason we exist
SITECH supporting the clean up effort in Paradise
After a month, Argonaut’s owner, Mike Smith Jr., was ready to scrap the Cat scales and replace them with Trimble. They were costing too much in overweight fines. “Mike called me one day to discuss switching to Trimble. I really hated to see him do that,” explains Mata. “I told him I’d much rather make it right with the systems he’d already invested in. That’s when we put our quick response team together.” Within two days, a five-man team from Peterson and SITECH assembled at Paradise to figure out the problem. “We spent four days testing and working with the customer to bring their excavator scales into 3 percent tolerance. As a dealer, we jumped through hoops, trying to get things to work the best we could and get the scales within an acceptable range.”
The team started off by loading up a truck, recording the weight from the machine’s onboard scale, then waiting for the truck to return with the tag from the landfill’s scale house to compare. Waiting three to six hours for
the three-hundred-mile round trip to the landfill got old fast. After the first day, the team came up with a better plan.
ENTER FRED
“We picked up a lava rock from the worker’s camp Argonaut was building in Paradise and hauled it down the road to Knife River Quarry,”says Mata.“We weighed it on their scale and painted that number on it.And with the customer’s help, we trailered that rock to
over twenty sites in three days. By the end of the
week, our rocky friend had a name: Fred.” Once they got Fred, they no longer had to wait for the return trip from the landfill. They could pick up and drop Fred as many times as they need- ed, and if the numbers added up, then the scale was deemed accurate. “We tested every machine scale, Cat and Trimble, to reassure the customer. Once we ran Fred through each machine scale, we conducted firmware updates to the ECMs [computer], calibrations, and testing.” The gi- ant rock was the one constant throughout our testing process to establish a zero baseline for
The original Fred loaded and ready to go to work
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