Tracks and Treads - Finning Canada

News & Reviews
by david dicenzo
Grading the Grader
John Lindroos isn’t exactly a member of
the video game generation. At 73, the
Wetaskiwin native doesn’t wear out
his wrists with endless hours on a Wii
or an Xbox. So when Lindroos, a longtime
grader operator for the County of
Wetaskiwin, needed to get up to speed on a
new M-series Cat grader that features a variety
of joysticks, he turned to a more youthful
teacher – his 25-year-old son Phillip.
Father and son had trained on a simulator
at the same time, but Phillip got a head start,
logging 120 hours on the real thing, which
was delivered while his dad was off recovering
from knee surgery. And it was up to Phillip
to teach dad when he returned to work.
“He was teacher for a day,” John says with a
laugh. “It went good.”
“It was basically just to get him familiarized
with the controls,” Phillip adds. “When
my dad came back, I spent half a day with
him showing him all the controls, what does
what. He did really good.”
The M-series Cat grader is a radical departure
from the older H-series models that
John knows so well. Cat invested about four
years of research and ultimately came up
with a motor grader that replaces a complicated
set of levers with a joystick that looks a
bit like a fighter jet’s hand control.
That didn’t matter to John, who,
despite having 37 years under his belt with
the county (30 of which he spent operating
graders), wanted to learn all about the new
machine. He says that after running the
grader for the past few months, it’s a piece
of cake.
“I like the machine,” says John. “The visibility’s
good and it seems to be a real nice
machine. It’s quiet.”
John figures he has a few years left
working at the county before he packs it in,
suggesting that he would love to get his 40-
year pin before retiring.
“I’m playing it by ear,” says the veteran
operator. “I’m getting old but if I didn’t
enjoy the work, I wouldn’t have done it for
this long.”
Perhaps a second career as a video gamer
is in the cards.
Is There a Mechanic in the House
What’s the worst-case scenario for a kid’s
hockey tournament A couple of teams
are no shows They’re out of pucks No
hot coffee for the parents in the stands
How about a Zamboni zoning out on
the middle of the ice between games
That’s what happened at a tourney
for seven- and eight-year-olds at Cardel
Place in Calgary last winter. Luckily,
Finning field technician Shawn Wallz
was around when the Zamboni went on
the fritz. Wallz’s son Ryan was playing in
the tournament and, like an off-duty doctor
jumping out of the crowd to treat an injured
player, Wallz had no trouble offering his
skills to help out.
“We were going to find our seats and
we noticed that the piece at the back of
the Zamboni where it actually scrapes the
ice had broken off,” recalls Wallz. “It was
putting huge scrapes into the ice.”
The off-duty mechanic saw the looks of
disappointment on the players’ faces. “The
kids were getting pretty upset because they
knew that was going to be it for the tournament.
I thought I’d go have a look at it.”
Wallz’s expertise is diagnosing and repairing
generator engines and natural gas engines
out in the field. He saw that the chain
on the machine had snapped and the snow
guard was caught up in the wheel. Wallz
drove to a nearby store, grabbed some parts
and, within about four hours, had the Zamboni
back up and running. Once the thing
fired up, the players and the crowd were
beaming. “Everybody was pretty happy,”
tracks & treads • Fall 2008 www.finning.ca