Maybe it’s karma, but some people seem destined to be mechanics. James Churchill of Powell River, British Columbia, has ricocheted through life as everything from a rock-and-roll guitarist to an over- the-road trucker, volunteered for two years with a Christian ministry to help fix equipment and build a road in Sudan, but now finds himself back in the world in which he started.
Churchill grew up working at his father’s farm equipment dealership in Saskatchewan. His father enrolled him in mechanic’s school when he was 16, but the teenaged Churchill’s interests were elsewhere.
“I was always fascinated by the idea of driving trucks,” he says. “So as soon as I got my mechanic ticket I got a job driving truck. And I’ve always loved music, started playing guitar in a band when I was 15, and eventually went professional. I played in Vegas and other places, but I was in a car wreck that ripped up my wrist. It took a long time to get so I could play guitar again. So I went back to trucking.”
Eventually the shine wore off the trucker’s life, and Churchill returned to his roots as a mechanic. He eventually landed in Powell River, B.C., where he set up a mobile repair service. Rather than pay for a moving company to haul his belongings, he bought a tandem-axle Ford Louisville with a van body. His final load of the move was his mechanic’s tools. He never unloaded them.
“I had a conventional service truck when I worked for a company building a road for the Winter Olympics,” he says. “I could never carry enough tools or parts on it. When I moved my mechanic’s tools that last time, I got to looking at the way that van body could be set up and decided to make that truck my service truck.”
His latest van-bodied service truck is based on a 1987 Peterbilt 359 chassis powered by a 3406B Caterpillar engine tweaked to 650 horsepower courtesy of Pittsburg Power components. Because the frame rails were rust-jacking, he bought a 2008 Kenworth with an air-suspended tandem rear axle, and combined the trucks.
“I cut the frames and combined the Pete front end with the Kenworth rear section,” he says. “I fish-plated it, did it all right, and the result is a truck that rides really nice.”
His “enclosed service body” is a 24-foot-long Collins-brand van body that has a passenger side-access door with swing-down steps. A 4,500- pound capacity AutoLift crane is mounted on the rear bumper/deck just outside a roll-up overhead door. Storage inside the van body includes Snap-on tool chests and StorLoc drawer-sets. A three- cylinder, two-stage Swan air compressor powered by a 13-hp Honda engine provides compressed air to a 160-gallon tank. He keeps the air compressor regulated to 200 pounds per square inch.
“I use Chicago Pneumatic air tools, and they’re holding up just fine to the high pressure,” he says. “But I did switch my air guns from square drive to spline drive because the square drives couldn’t handle the 200 psi.”
A Lincoln Ranger 8 welder/generator powered by a 20-hp Kohler two-cylinder engine handles electrical needs, while yellow highway stripes define the center line of his work area.
“I had the safety tape, and just thought it would look cool,” he laughs. “The other thing that makes my truck colorful is that all my hammers, pry bars, chain hooks and stuff that’s easy to lose are painted red. When I’m cleaning up to leave a job, if I see anything ‘red,’ it’s mine.”
While he has laptops for diagnostics and internet access, Churchill hasn’t renewed his manufacturers’ diagnostic software subscriptions in recent years.
“Dealerships handle most of the late model stuff around here,” he says. “It wasn’t worth paying $12,000 a year to renew when I only do two or three re-flash jobs a year.”
Churchill limits his on-truck advertising to relatively small decals with his business’s name (“IFIXCATS”) in unique fonts.
“I asked the guy to make the lettering look like graffiti, with the letters faded on the edges like they were spray painted” he says.
While his business’s name is accurate, it led to at least one misunderstanding.
“A guy called and asked how much it would cost to fix his cat,” recalls Churchill. ”When I asked what year it was, he asked, ‘Do they go by year?’ Turns out he wanted his house cat neutered.”