Aaron Morgan is a skilled heavy equipment mechanic, but only because he needs that expertise in order to do what he truly enjoys.
“I have to take things apart before I can do the welding and machining, which is the part of the job I really love,” says the 32-year-old owner of Industrial IronWorks, a mobile machining and welding business in Okanogan, Washington. “I’ve had a passion for welding since I was in grade school. I got trained through a welding apprenticeship, worked in some Cat shops, and then went out on my own.”
Morgan works on-site at mines, quarries and wherever equipment too large to haul to a shop needs repairs. He does precision welding and on-site machining in summer’s heat or winter’s cold, dealing with clouds of dust or sucking mud, in a personal quest for mechanical perfection.
“Honestly, I take so much pride in the work I do in the field that I think I do better work in the field, on-site, than a lot of machine shops do under controlled conditions,” says Morgan. “I won’t leave a job till it’s perfect.”
Perfection requires a variety of specialized machine tools transported to job sites in “Ol’ Yeller,” Morgan’s one-of-a-kind service truck. The chassis is a 1985 Kenworth W900B loaded with a 3406 Caterpillar engine in front of a 13-speed transmission. Morgan says the tandem-axle, twin-screw rear axles supported by a New Wave air-ride suspension is not only necessary to keep the 40,000-pound GVW monster road-legal, but to get him where he needs to go.
“There are places where we have to chain-up (install chains on the rear tires for traction), and the air suspension really helps with traction under those conditions,” he says.
Ol’ Yeller carries a 22-foot long, low-profile Brutus service body outfitted with American Eagle tool chests and a Tiger 8000-pound hydraulic crane. A Lincoln “Vantage 500” welder powered by a four-cylinder turbo-charged Perkins diesel engine shares welding duties with a Miller “Trailblazer 302 EFI” welder/generator. An Airworks “Twister” T60 screw-type air compressor is equipped with a three-cylinder Kubota diesel engine that also provides hydraulic power for the truck’s crane.
While Morgan’s toolboxes are loaded with hand wrenches and power tools to handle nuts and bolts up to three inches in diameter, the core of his trade rides in the center bay.
“We’ve got my machine tools loaded in job boxes, and we crane the boxes in and out of the bed of the truck,” he says. “On-site, we unload the tools, assemble them and tack-weld them to the pieces we’re machining. I haven’t run into anything I wouldn’t tackle, and everything we’ve tackled, we’ve done what we said we could do. One job required 17 hours of welding and used two and a half spools of welding wire before we used our line-boring tools to re-size the bore.”
Morgan and his wife, Jennifer, are the management and workforce at Industrial IronWorks. They often park Ol’ Yeller at a job site, then commute in their pickup truck to their home. They stay in motels when necessary, and in one case lived in their camping trailer for more than two months while completing a particularly lengthy job.
Machining requires extreme attention to detail, and Morgan’s insistence on quality extends to even the brand of vise he has bolted to the tailboard of the truck.
“It’s got to be a Wilton vise,” he says. “It cost $1,200, but you get your money back because it’s nearly indestructible. I don’t scrimp on tools. If a tool will make my job easier or help me get better results, I’m going to own it. I’m just fortunate that my wife agrees with that philosophy.”
Morgan jokes that only the apprentice welder who works for him, his office managing-wife, and their insurance agent know exactly how many dollars’ worth of tools are aboard the huge yellow truck.
“When we head out to an average job, there’s probably $200,000 worth of tools on-board, counting the welders and air compressor and the special machine tools,” he says. “But you’ve got to have what you need to do the job right, and that’s the only way I do things.”
Dan Anderson is a part-time freelance writer and full-time heavy equipment mechanic with more than 20 years of experience working out of service trucks. He is based in Bouton, Iowa.