When the oil patch boom in Alberta faded, Dane Quartly was laid off from his job with a Finning Canada Caterpillar dealership in Red Deer. After serious consideration, the 35-year-old took his accumulated experience, first as a John Deer Master Technician and later as a Caterpillar S level tech, and started his own business: Dane’s Heavy Duty Repair. Looking back, he’s glad he made the jump.
“Toward the end at Finning, I was going on calls to the same places to do the same things day after day, and I was to the point where I was thinking, ‘I can’t keep doing this,’” he says. “I’m not somebody who enjoys doing and seeing the same thing day after day. There’s a lot of land in Alberta, and the more I can see of it, the better.”
After five years running his own business, Quartly has two employees — a journeyman who runs a 5500 Dodge service truck; and an apprentice working toward his mechanic’s ticket — and more work than he can keep up with.
“I can see now that I was working toward being an independent while I was learning at the dealerships,” Quartly says. “The downturn in the oil patch just helped push me out of the nest.”
Quartly works from a T300 Kenworth powered by a Paccar PX8 engine turning a 10-speed manual transmission. A 14-foot IMT Dominator II service body equipped with a 10,500-pounds capacity IMT crane is his shop on wheels.
“Ninety-eight percent of our work is onsite,” he says. “I’ve got a small shop here at home, but for the most part, we work in the field or use a customer’s shop for engine work and big repairs.”
The truck was used when he bought it. Quartly didn’t change much to fit his needs. It came with a 45-cubic-feet-per-minute hydraulically driven air compressor, mounted on the top left side of the box, that feeds a 90-gallon air tank mounted across the top of the front of the service body. His one big alteration to the service body was to position a Miller Bobcat 250 welder/generator at the front of the center bay, under a sliding cover, and route the welding cables to one of the side boxes.
“I wanted the welder and the cables out of the weather,” Quartly says. “I pulled the drawer packs out of the right side compartment over the rear wheels, and put in AlumaReel reels with 100 feet of welding cable. That’s also where I put a reel for my oxyacetylene torch with 50 feet of hoses.”
The truck came equipped with full sets of IMT roller-bearing drawers and storage boxes in the compartments. Quartly loaded them with a full array of standard field mechanic’s tools, along with a few “money-makers.”
“I do a lot of undercarriages. So I got a 100-ton Cat track press and a 60-ton hollow pin press,” he says. “That track press has paid for itself many times beyond its cost. It actually gained me work. Other guys hire me and that press just to push out pins. They do all the other work. All I do is show up, push out the pins and collect a check.”
While brute force helps pay the bills for Quartly, he also makes money working on the intricacies of computerized control systems.
“I’ve got a laptop in each truck, loaded with Cat, Cummins, Deere, Detroit and other sys- tem-management software,” he says. “I started out at Deere and Cat dealerships so I’m familiar with their programs and was trained on all of them. To me, it was a no-brainer to get the lap- tops and be able to do the work on the modern equipment. (Independent mechanics) who don’t like to work on computerized systems and don’t keep up with that stuff are going to get left behind.”
Quartly admits, “It can be frustrating, dealing with computer problems in equipment. But I’m a lot less sore at the end of the day after tapping on a keyboard than I am swinging a 20-pound sledge hammer.”
Quartly has no plans for major changes to his truck aside from building a lube skid. Or lube trailer.
“I haven’t decided yet which way I’ll go,” he says. “Either way, it will have a waste-oil tank and diaphragm pump, along with a fresh-oil tank so I don’t have to carry umpteen buckets of oil. Other than that, the truck works great and makes me money just the way it is.”
