Page 337 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Hero was a homerun. It did everything better than we thought it would. It out-pulled and outperformed our other tractors because of the modifications we made. For us, that was huge.
– Tim Thomas, South Pole Traverse operations manager; current project manager, Peterson Power
experienced what we had out on the ice.” In Feb- ruary 2014, a bid proposal went out for nine new Challenger tractors customized for the extreme cold. They wanted the first one ready to fly out of McChord AFB (Tacoma, WA) in September so they could test it alongside the original machines on the 2014-2015 Traverse season. The other eight were due by mid-December for shipment from Port Hueneme, near Los Angeles, in mid-January for the once-a-year voyage to Antarctica.
Peterson and three other Caterpillar dealers were invited to bid. “We were up against the Austra- lia-Tasmanian dealer who had done the first set of Challengers,” says Duane Jr. “We didn’t have any blueprints to work off of, just some pictures and verbal descriptions.” What Peterson did have was Craig Bolton. He knew from experience what the Traverse tractors looked like and where their de- ficiencies were. He’d also worked on the Traverse with Tim Thomas and knew him well. “No one at Peterson knew what a Traverse tractor was or what it had to do,” says Bolton. “They knew absolutely nothing about it. But everyone involved was 110 percent open to my ideas and suggestions. They needed someone to tell them what needed to be done. So all those times out on the trail when I’d thought This needs to be different and Why wasn’t it done this way—I was able to put all those ideas down on paper and we just ran with it.”
Peterson won the bid in March 2014 and start- ed gearing up. It stipulated nine rubber-tracked MT 865C Challengers with 525-hp Cat engines. At the time, AGCO-Challenger was just switch- ing over to the Swedish-built Tier 4 SISU engine, which uses urea (DEF) to meet emissions com- pliance. Ironically, emissions issues are the exact opposite in the polar regions because urea freezes. Randy Grimes, Peterson’s Ag GM, was quick to snag the last nine Challengers off the assembly line with Cat C18 engines in them. “We didn’t have a P.O. yet, but they were slated for us,” says Joe Frati, the project manager who converted Portland’s old
weld shop into a new dedicated Challenger Shop. “By the time we had the shop organized and or- dered the parts we thought we’d need, the tractors were starting to show up.” It was finally go time.
The first machine arrived at the end of April. “Hero was our prototype—the one we learned on,” says Mike Stubb, lead mechanic on the project. “Later on, we were still making refinements but by then it was a little more like production work. Hero was my favorite because we spent so much time on it, trying to work out all the bugs. It was the first- born.” By the time the Peterson 9 were commis- sioned and out on the ice, Thomas reported only three minor problems—all AGCO factory war- ranty issues—from the thousands of man-hours put into the project.
Hero–the prototype
The team of technicians fluctuated based on need, but Mike Stubb and Bill Roberson were the main- stays along with ThinkBIG apprentice Taylor
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