Page 278 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

in time and efficiency. “What it boils down to is customer service—providing the customer with what they want,” says Ravazza, who began his ca- reer at Peterson in 1978. “We work with our cus- tomers to get the most potential out of their ma- chinery for their special applications.”
CUSTOM FABRICATION IN THE NORTH
The Portland weld shop was doing custom de- sign and production long before Peterson arrived in Oregon. Under the previous dealership—Hal- ton—they had a crew of thirty-five welders and machinists (at its peak) known simply as Shop T5. One prototype earned its own Cat spec sheet— the Cat D3 tree digger used for harvesting nursery trees, dated July 1979. The machine had a tall rect- angular cutout, from stem to stern, underneath the cab and engine housing, and rode on quadrangular tracks. The fab shop also did a number of modifi- cations for a pineapple and sugar operation called Hawaiian Commercial back in the early 1990s. “They actually shipped over two of their D8s from Hawaii,” recalls Jerry Boon, who welded for Hal- ton at the time. “We built a D8 planter and a D8 rototiller for them. We added another engine on the front of the rototiller to power the hydraulics for the six-foot drum. We fabricated the ripper bar, the rototiller, the motor mounts. Everything.”
In 2000, the weld shop started lengthening exca- vator booms and sticks for a contractor who dug windmill foundations in the Gorge. Every year millions of watts of power are produced in the Columbia River Gorge of southern Washington, making it an interesting niche market. “A customer needed to dig down thirty feet for windmill foot- ings,” says Boon. “To do that you’d normally need a 345 or 375 excavator, which can’t be hauled around on windmill roads.” The Portland crew added four feet to the boom and eight feet to the stick to give it the depth they needed with their 330s. “Our modifications allowed them to dig a foundation a day while their competition was doing one a week. I’m really proud of the long list of people we’ve helped in a pinch to get back up and running and help maximize their profits,” says Boon.
NOT JUST A TRACTOR BUSINESS ANYMORE
Many of the projects that come through Peterson’s Special Services are difficult to classify and look less and less like traditional tractors. “If you look at custom fab today, it’s not just a tractor business anymore. It’s marine, it’s landfill, it’s quarries and plant facilities and everything else we’re into,” says Ravazza. “We can do all that because we have the shops and tooling, the expertise and years of expe- rience. The tricky part is making people aware of all that we can do for them.”
Peterson’s custom fab workload averages roughly 45 percent bucket production, 40 percent repair work and 15 percent custom projects. “Out of all the custom projects we quote, only about 10 per- cent actually get built,” says Ravazza. “We get a lot of people with ideas they want us to quote on, which takes a lot of research time to get the num- bers right. I don’t know how many projects we’ve gone through only to have the customer scrap it in the end because of cost.” Several come to mind, like the fish-bubble curtain and the cable “tendon” puller for the local bridge retrofits, or the traveling
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