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The Americas Tour
We join the Rice Lake bus on its 2009 East Coast tour. After the tour and demonstrations, the Q&A began and Jeff Malinowski and Steve Delaney had answers for all.
Publish Date: 12/21/2009
Riding with Jeff Malinowski, tour bus manager, was a treat. It was so exciting to join the bus on its maiden East Coast tour to see firsthand how the new wrap design would be received by our customers.Rice Lake distributors, their customers and technicians loved the wrap, however they were soon walking straight past the wrap to the Rice Lake expertise on board. After the tour and demonstrations, the Q&A began and Jeff Malinowski and Steve Delaney had answers for all.
Scale Service & Supply Co., Inc.
Rensselaer, New York
We are meeting owner Charlie Twiss, his daughter Lori, and son-in-law Dean Haita. After the tour of equipment, the conversation turns to the Certificate Retrieval System, a web-based calibration certificate software program. They have a client who manufactures silicone parts for the auto industry. Beside three truck scales and a brace of DeckHands, the client has 320 scales that have to be calibrated every month.
Dean remembers the switch from paper to PDAs. “The first time Scale Service & Supply used the Certificate Retrieval System, the technicians came back to the shop at noon. We asked them what they were doing back so soon. It usually took them until three or four o’clock to completely finish all the paperwork. They were done before noon and had the afternoon open for other calls. “We dock the PDAs and the data is posted on our website.”Not only was the calibration and data management more efficient, Scale Service & Supply cleaned out a long bookshelf. Dean recalls, “They had two shelves all the way around his office filled with binders of calibration certificates. Now they’re empty. He donated the binders to a school.”
Pro-Tech Scale Service
Amsterdam, New York
Craig Boehler, president, and Marie Boehler, the manager who manages most everything, are hosting a lunchtime picnic with the tour bus as the star attraction. They have invited customers from gravel quarries and waste plants, along with the county Weights & Measures Department folks. All are encouraged to take the tour and tuck into the largest Subway® sandwiches I have ever seen.
The picnic table talk then turns to single-point grounding, especially grounding in gravel. One of the Weights & Measures Department directors claims, “One of the biggest problems is having load cells knocked out by electrical storms.”That is all it takes to start Jeff extolling Rice Lake’s five-year protection warranty. “We put $500 worth of surge protection into our truck scale systems. Our single-point ground system and transient protection have eliminated lightning concerns. If our transient protection senses anything over 30 volts, it automatically shorts to ground. Sometimes a component may be sacrificed, but that is better than taking out a load cell.
“Even with $500 worth of hardware, it doesn’t do any good if you don’t have a good single-point ground. We want the indicator grounded to the same ground as the truck scale, the remote display and the printer. We send along with our truck scales 100 feet of copper wire for that purpose. Picture a lightning strike a mile away. It travels through the ground to your grounding rod where you can get an extremely high-voltage surge. The copper wire makes an easier path for the spike to dissipate.”
Neil Daley, director of the Fulton County Department of Weights & Measures, says it is hard to get a good ground in gravel. “I know a guy who has to water the ground when a storm is coming.” Someone suggests drilling a well to get to water and a more permanent ground or using the utility ground.
I make a note to send them Rice Lake’s white paper on single-point grounding.
Jeff adds, “Maintenance is the biggest plus point to keeping any truck scale running. Our truck scales are much easier to maintain. We don’t have bumper bolts to get hung up. We have rock guards to keep out debris so it doesn’t freeze. Our portable scale has sectional clean-out plates. It is wide enough to get a shovel in there, and there aren’t any electronics to get in the way.”
National Scale of New England, Inc.
Springfield, Massachusetts
Mike Anderson takes us to visit their customer All State Materials’ liquid asphalt terminal. This is probably the largest liquid asphalt terminal in the eastern states. Over 4.5 million gallons of liquid asphalt are stored in heated storage tanks.
They recently purchased two Rice Lake OTR truck scales. Mike Anderson’s crew installed the truck scales in a containment pit surrounded with wooden decking material flush to the floor. Although there are several fail-safe systems to prevent spills, All State Materials wanted to be able to clean up easily should a spill happen. Then the filling equipment and building were built around the scale. It takes less than 15 minutes to completely fill a tanker truck. Pretty impressive facility, and we are proud to have Rice Lake scales as part of it.
Commercial Scale & Balance Co.
Agawam, Massachusetts
Travis Wheeler, lead service technician, and Mary Alyce Houle, administrative assistant, are taking me to “The Big E,” New England States’ fair and exposition, to see Commercial Scale’s amusing display.
Travis has worked with the folks at the fair for several years supplying scales for their special needs. The Big E originally called to lease a scale to weigh the sheep and giant pumpkins and measure the force of workhorse pulling teams.
Last year the fair had offered space in the Agricultural Barn for a display about weighing. Commercial Scale set up a Rice Lake floor scale, LaserLight® messaging unit and 920i®. Andrew Hensley, scale technician, had recently taken a training course at Rice Lake to learn how to program the 920i. He wrote a program that sends information to a LaserLight display indicating what the weight of a person standing on the scale is equal to—a bale of hay, a cow or calf, or giant pumpkin. By the end of the three-week fair, 24,285 people had stepped on the scale and three times that many had laughed and encouraged their friends to climb on the scale that they themselves would not go near.
The Big E runs an annual contest in search of the year’s signature fair food. The winner this year was a concoction named the “Craz-E Burger,” created by Martin Brownsey of West Seneca, New York. Craz-E Burger, as served at the Big EZ Café, is a righteous–sized juicy burger with a generous dollop of gooey melted cheese topped with strips of extra-thick bacon on a grilled glazed doughnut. Really. It all comes together though, the glaze and the bacon, the soft sweet bread, the stringy cheese and everything else.
We each had a fresh cow’s milk shake from the stand outside the Agricultural Building and rejoined the bus at the Holyoke Holiday Inn parking lot where we met Commercial Scale owner Jim Irwin and technician Jerry Gamache. They toured the bus, and Jeff did his usual great job explaining all that is on board.
The MotoWeigh® In Motion Checkweigher demonstration is new, and one can tell Jeff is fascinated with it. “There is less vibration in this design, and no lubrication is needed because of the Delrin® wear blocks. The Interlox® Conveyor belt has multiple sources of supply making it easy to maintain. You can raise the conveyor to clean it and you can clean it while it’s running. You can weigh multiple products—just set up the tolerances and you’re good to go.”
My bus trip was a great ride. When we pulled majestically through intersections, people stared. They were not mistaking us for a rock band, but I felt a rush of heady celebrity. At the toll booth on the interstate, Jeff pulled away ever so slowly. He said, “I don’t want to leave them in a cloud of exhaust fumes.”
That was so Rice Lake.
