Page 288 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Fieldman/welder, John Kaszer is now the Special Services foreman in San Leandro.
Another old-timer story tells of Howard going out into the shop in a suit and tie and jumping in to help weld. His clothes got all messed up, but he didn’t care because he loved welding and knew what he was doing. Perhaps the best story is how Howard impressed Henry J. Kaiser back in the late 1920s, during an eight-month stint in Cuba as Kaiser’s welding boss. Their giant Koehring paver had stripped out several gear teeth, which completely shut down the job. Howard figured out a way to weld and reconstruct the six-inch teeth onto the giant cast iron hopper and get it work- ing again.1 “Early arc welding didn’t have flux, so it took a lot of artistry and skill to weld back in those days,” says Duane Sr. “You had to be really good. It was a true craft.”
Today, Peterson’s fab shops carry on the same tra- dition of craftsmanship and pride of work. Weld- ing and custom repair play key roles, both in-house and out on the jobsite. Often techs get called out on emergencies when time is ticking and a penalty
1 Read the full story in Peterson: The First Sixty Years, page 8. 286 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG
fee is waiting in the wings. In 2009, Peterson got an emergency call for repairs on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The bridge was fifteen inches too high to meet the shear key—the portion that rests on land. Fieldmen John Kaszer (now Special Services foreman in San Leandro) and Karl Sieber (retired 2018) spent a week suspended one hundred feet above the water on a narrow catwalk, line-boring and machining new holes for several crossbeams that didn’t match up. “We do cool stuff like that all the time,” says Ravazza, “but we usually take it for granted because it’s just what we do.”
More and more, Peterson Power is using Tractor’s fab shop as a collaborative partner. In 2017, the Coast Guard had an emergency situation on one of their boats. Their usual vendor wasn’t available, and they had to be out on the water in a day and a half. Peterson got the call. “Anytime you take an engine out, it never goes back in exactly where it was before because things shift on a boat,” says Ravazza. “So we went out there and helped them realign it and re-dowel it into place using our por- table boring bar.”
Welding repairs are becoming commonplace in new construction, where more and more mate- rials are pre-fabricated off-site, then hauled in for placement. When alignment is off, Peterson’s
Portable boring bar in place for re-aligning miss-matched holes in crossbeams