Thinking for the Long Haul - Overhauled S1E14

Thinking for the Long Haul - Overhauled S1E14 is now on your favorite podcast app!

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In this podcast your host Melissa Petersmann (The Diesel Queen) discusses Insurance, thinking long term, old tech vs. new tech, and many more interesting topics in a style that only she can bring - raw and unfiltered. 

Melissa welcomes  Eugene Torkelson, mechanic.

As always, thank you for watching and listening!

Transcript for Thinking for the Long Haul - Overhauled S1E14

Melissa:

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Hey guys, welcome back to Overhauled with me, the Diesel Queen. Today I am here with Eugene, who has some interesting topics about wages and health insurance, and actually really diving deep into figuring out your wages and what's worth it, because it's not always just about your hourly rate. So Eugene, why don't you introduce yourself. Kind of give us a little bit of a background as to how you got into this industry.

Eugene Torkelson:

Hey, my name's Eugene Torkelson. I'm 62 years old and I've only been doing the diesel end of things since about 2017. Prior to that was very little. It maybe a tractor engine once in a while when I used to work for John Deere, but mostly I've been in lawn and garden for 40 years. So the biggest diesels I usually worked on were the little Yanmars and Kubotas. Like I said, I started working for our county and have been in the shop there. And so I've had a whole different getting involved in this from a different angle than what most people do and at a lot older age. My background, like I said, has been small engines, so chainsaws, trimmers, mowers, ATVs, motorcycles. I was familiar with that kind of thing. But going from, I used to always tell everybody I liked working on lawnmower stuff, small engines, because I could pick it up and put it on the bench. And that's changed. Now you don't pick it up, you figure out other ways of doing it. You work a little smarter and not harder.

Melissa:

Well, that's what I've always told people with the heavy equipment stuff. Everybody's always asking me like, "Oh my God, you're so small. How do you work on something so big? I don't understand." And it's like everything is so big that everybody uses a crane. The big cornfed motherfucker in the shop ain't lifting half that shit. So it's actually easier. I've tried to explain that to people a million times. I think heavy equipment's easier on you than light because you're not able to lift, you're not going to be lifting ahead off of 15 or 16 or even probably a 12 liter and up engine. The strong guy in the shop's not going to be lifting that head off.

Eugene Torkelson:

From a 100 pound lawnmower to a 1900 pound dozer transmission. You do it differently.

Melissa:

Exactly. And I think it's easier a little bit, obviously swinging the hammers and driving pins out and stuff like that, I think that's kind of hard on your body. But as far as the lifting stuff goes, you're not lifting a lot of this shit, because like you said, no one's going to be lifting the 1900 pound transmission. That's just not even realistic. And if they try, they're an idiot.

Eugene Torkelson:

And Cat's got that figured out. That was breach, pulling them out of that.

Melissa:

So I've heard from my father, so I've heard from him, he is a caterpillar man by heart.

Eugene Torkelson:

Just slide right out.

Melissa:

That's what I've been told. I've never seen it, but that's what I've been told.

Eugene Torkelson:

I could not believe it, but-

Melissa:

Well, John Deere does it completely different than Caterpillar.

Eugene Torkelson:

Oh?

Melissa:

We don't even have transmissions in our dozers. It's all hydrostatic.

Eugene Torkelson:

Well this is, I guess I wouldn't call it a hydrostat as such, but it's a hydraulic shifted in stuff, but it's geared inside. And we had a relief valve that got some stuff underneath it and was stuck and the thing wouldn't move. That was fun. In the pit.

Melissa:

Oh, boy.

Eugene Torkelson:

We got lucky and all of a sudden decided to move and load. So we did get it in the shop, but slid it out and probably wouldn't have had to, but we went ahead and slid it out so we could drain everything, clean everything, flush out all the inside, which turned out to be really clean. But that's all it was. Just a little speck of stuff underneath a relief valve.

Melissa:

It's amazing how the tiniest little things can affect the hydraulic system. I've seen that too. I've seen it where there's been little bitty pieces of dirt that get in the inside, the little valves and little control valves, and they stick sometimes and sometimes they don't. And sometimes things like that can be really fucking hard to diagnose. You really got to look at a schematic, a hydraulic schematic, and you really got to read and look and follow the flow patterns and pay attention to if this valve is sticking, what's going to happen down the line. And that to me what makes a difference between a parts changer and a mechanic is figuring it out, that exact stuff, figuring it out. And hydraulics can be pretty ... It's not just a pump and some hoses and some cylinders. Hydraulics can be pretty extensive. And like you said, transmissions have hydraulics now. And our backhoes had some hydraulics like the internals, obviously they had a normal gear and hydraulic clutch pack transmission.

And then obviously the rest of the backhoe has two control valves and a load sense. And then the load sensing system is a whole nother deal to wrap your head around, the load sense, and open valves, open center valves versus closed center valves. There's a whole different way the system works and if you don't understand how those control valves work, open center versus the closed center and reading schematics, it's going to be really fucking hard to figure out what's going on. When I took a capstone training for excavators, they did it completely different than every other capstone I've ever been in. Every capstone I've been in for a John Deere was, we bug it, they bugged it. They would bug the electric side, they pull wires out from the back of connectors, like little tiny things or put a bad CAN bus termination resistor in there or all kinds of things, electrical that you could see, you could figure out if you really pinpointed it down and you really did your diagnostics, you could find what they did to it.

In my excavator capstone class, they actually were taking control valves and taking relief valves and shit out of that pilot manifold. And they were putting bad control valves and shit and regulators in the pumps. They were doing all kinds of stuff that there's no way unless you tore apart, you would know what they did. But it forced you to use the schematic and that's what you had to do. You had to figure out which functions we're working in, which weren't. Because excavators, the control valve has two halves and each half runs some of the controls and then the other half runs the other amount of controls. And you got to really fucking put your brain together to figure that out. And pretty much the only way you could figure it out is take the symptoms and look at the schematic and figure out what they fucking did.

Eugene Torkelson:

It's just like a liquid wiring diagram. You're looking through, you got diodes, you got resistors, you got the same thing in hydraulics, it just does different functions. You're just doing it with electricity. They tell us in electricity, if you have trouble reading a diagram, just think of it as plumbing. You're flowing water, which sometimes that works.

Melissa:

Electrical and hydraulics is the two things that I've learned over the course of the seven years I've been in it that most people struggle with. And usually, mechanics, they either get electrics really well and they understand it or they get hydraulics really well and understand it. But what I've learned is if you have a guy that's really good at electrical diagnostics and understanding electrics, he's probably going to understand hydraulics really well. Where if you have a guy that's really good with hydraulics, they might still struggle with electrical, which was me.

But I think people don't really take the time to understand. You have to understand how it's supposed to work before you have any hope in hell of diagnosing something that's wrong. Especially when it's minute, customers complaining about a little bit of this, the functions are slowed, is what they say, or their cylinder seems like it's drifting. Or really minute things. We've had a couple customers take us for a run for their money on my functions seems slower or it seems like I don't have as much hydraulic power or one of my cylinders doesn't feel like it has as much power as the rest of them.

And if you don't know how that machine is supposed to run, it's going to be really hard to figure out what the customer's talking about. Especially something like, it's obvious when you've got a cylinder gushing oil out or a function won't work at all. If you got a major component failure, that's pretty fucking easy. But when it comes down to them little things like maybe your load sense is a little too low or your differential pressure's fucked up or something like that, that's really minute. It's kind of hard to figure out sometimes.

I know we were talking a little bit before we started recording about you wanted to cover health insurance and you had a story about a kid that left his current job and you don't really feel like he's getting his bang for his buck, even though he is getting a higher hourly wage, you didn't really feel like his new job is giving him the same bang for his buck as the old job. So why don't you dive into that and explain that to us.

Eugene Torkelson:

I don't necessarily know what all they hired him at, but just in the situations that we've had with people that have applied, they look at what the hourly wage is and it's like, well, literally what some of them have said is, "That won't even buy me beer and pizza." Well, they don't sit down and take a pen and pencil and figure out ... Where I work out at the county, they pay 100% of your health insurance and it's Blue Cross Blue Shield. It's good insurance. My wife where she used to work, had the exact same policy before I worked here, and it was costing us $750 a month. Well, where I work at, that's a deductible for one person, 1500 for family.

Melissa:

And they paid for all that.

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah. Two months it paid for our monthly premiums forever. And kids nowadays, younger, well not even just younger, there's people that are, I'd say middle-aged even. They just look at that money, here's so many dollars an hour. And it's like, "Well that's not worth my time." Well, you figure out how much that benefit is worth and all of a sudden if you put that to dollars, you are making dollars. And that's not coming out of your pocket, the county's paying for it, or your employer. I know there's other employers that do it too. Not very many that'll pay it.

Melissa:

Yeah. Usually only government jobs do that and even then some of them don't.

Eugene Torkelson:

No, but there's other benefits that are in with your job and when you're looking at it, you need to look at those benefits and see, and I know you've touched on before, the idea of having your weekends. Now a lot of these other jobs, you're working either half a day every Saturday or half a day every other Saturday, or maybe you're working all day every other Saturday. And I know a lot of places go four tens and that way they've got Friday, Saturday, Sunday or something and they don't allow us to do that. It's been brought up before, but they seem to think we need to be there at least five days a week, which I like having my weekends other than if we're pushing snow. And it only seems like you pushed snow on Saturday or Sunday.

Melissa:

Yeah. I had an ex-boyfriend that worked for a city in Colorado, worked for a city as a mechanic. And I remember he had amazing benefits. He had amazing rolling holidays, which I had never heard about before in my life until he started working there. Like rolling holidays. Every single holiday you could possibly think of was either a rolling holiday or you got it off, his time off was amazing. Stuff like that. But snow shift, yeah, if it threatened, especially in this part of northern Colorado because they are California transplants into Northern Colorado and if one flake of snowfalls, everybody loses their shit. And so that's what they would do if it threatened and it was like 40% chance there's like a 40% chance of snow. They were on snow shift, 12 hour rotations.

Eugene Torkelson:

Oh really?

Melissa:

Yeah.

Eugene Torkelson:

We'll get called out and we try not to go out until it's done snowing because it really doesn't do much good until it does. And we're in North Central, by the way, so ...

Melissa:

North central what?

Eugene Torkelson:

Kansas.

Melissa:

Okay. Kansas.

Eugene Torkelson:

That we're, I don't know, probably 60 miles. No, it's not that much. 30 ... probably 40 miles from the Nebraska border. And so yeah, we used to get a lot of snow. We don't get as much anymore, but when we do, if we get a big snow, we usually, it will usually dump about six inches or so and then we need to get out and get the roads off. We just got through with one that it was basically dry enough, it blew off the only place that it was where it was drifted across the road. We had to go bust it up, but it really wasn't all that bad to get off. But we're got plows on our dump trucks is what we use. And the motivator on the gravel roads.

Melissa:

Well this part of northern Colorado was ... That sounds a lot more where I'm living now and in Wyoming where they wouldn't necessarily ... I'm just going to say this was Boulder, Colorado. Everybody knows that Boulder, Colorado is the hippie weed California central of this part of the country. And if the bikes weren't cleared after six inches of snow, people were calling the city and bitching. So if they didn't have snow plow trucks out, actively clearing every flake of snow, people were going to bitch, because it was just full of entitled people from California that were not used to the snow. So all the rest of us locals are like, dude, it's wintertime.

Eugene Torkelson:

We got people moving here from Colorado because the Californian ones are moving to Colorado. And that's what we've heard since we're just tired of them.

Melissa:

Well, I never understood because growing up, I grew up in southern Wyoming and northern Colorado. That's where I grew up and that's where I lived my entire life up until a year ago. And I've always heard, that was just a thing. People in Northern Colorado and Denver specifically, they drive like Californians. That's what we always said. They're like, they're all Californians. They all drive Californians. Well, that's just been instilled in my head. I had never been to California, but that's just been instilled in my brain since I was little. Then I go to LA three times this year for music video stuff and driving those interstates. I'm like, oh my fucking God.

Eugene Torkelson:

Now you know what they're talking about.

Melissa:

Now I know what you're talking about, because it is. Where I'm living now, in a different part of the Midwest where I'm living now, when the interstate is going and we're doing 70, 80 and then it'll slowly slow down and everybody slowly slows down. Well, in Denver it's like we're doing 80 and then we're doing 10 and then we're doing 80 and then we're doing 10. And I just thought that's how interstates worked. Well, no, it is not. It is literally only the places where Californian people live. It is California and then it is the front range of Colorado, because nowhere else does that. But a little off topic, but I put on a rant.

But yeah, the whole health insurance thing, like I told you earlier, I didn't even really dive into it because I was still on my parents' insurance until last year, my birthday of last year when they had to drop me because I turned 26. And I don't know if a lot of people just don't sign up for it or don't do it, or they just see a plan that is the cheapest and go there. Like I told you, I spent an hour on the phone with my mom going over health insurance plans and which ones are the best to choose from. And like you said, I don't think a lot of people take health insurance benefits into consideration. Unless they're a family, then they might. But yeah, I think that's-

Eugene Torkelson:

Well and the younger people have the, "Well, I'm healthy and I'm going to live forever" attitude.

Melissa:

My dad has that attitude.

Eugene Torkelson:

I was younger. I was young, felt that way too. I'm not going to die, I don't need health insurance. I never get sick and I still really don't. I'm pretty healthy, I don't get sick a lot. I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which that was a nightmare. But got that under control and I'm healthy as can be through all this COVID stuff and all that. I've been just healthy as anybody else in the family or better, which is weird. It shouldn't be that way because supposedly I'm supposed to catch everything just even flies by me now. But I've always had a really good immune system, so I've never worried too much about health insurance myself.

Well, first time I went to the doctor's office, I'd thrown out my back and I went down there and they looked for my file and I said, "You're probably not going to find one, because I don't come in here except for physicals. It's probably very thin." And yeah, they found it and there wasn't nothing in there, but CDL physicals every year and that was it. But as you get older or if you had a family, then the stuff starts coming up and if it's there, that's part of your benefit package and that's money either coming out of your pocket from your wages or if they're paying for it, then you're not having to pay for that upfront like that. And you just got to figure that in. Yeah, I mean you just can't look at the dollar amount per hour and just go off of that there. There's other factors you just really need to sit down and think about and how things are going to be in the future.

Melissa:

Well, another point that we've sort of touched on along this line of topics was retirement investments and 401ks and Roths and stuff like that. I started my first account at Honnen Equipment when I was 19, I think I was 19. Yeah, I think I was either barely 18, almost 19 or I was 19 when I started at Honnen. And that was, I had no idea. I didn't know anything about it. All I knew was that my mom told me I should have it. Companies match a certain amount, but it's only up to a certain amount and then it's a full match, but it's only a certain amount of percentages and the years that you're in the company changes that percentage, the matching percentage and stuff like that. So I started looking kind of heavily into that.

I started, especially last year, the year before, I was putting in 25% of my profits into the 401K and the Roth because I can make money right now and that's great, but in the future, I don't want to be that person that worked my life away and made great money while I was doing it, but now I am 75 and I want to be able to retire. I want to have that option. I want to be able to retire if I want to. Obviously I've met a bunch of people, but actually the old truck driver for Four Rivers, who was also my farrier, he was like 65 and he could have retired five years ago, but he was bored. And so he just decided to stay. And he was a truck driver. He just drove trucks for us.

Eugene Torkelson:

But he's got the option.

Melissa:

Yeah, he's got the option for it. He didn't have to be there, which he reminded my boss of multiple times, which was great. But he had some fire in him for being 65, I tell you that.

Eugene Torkelson:

Well, 65's not old.

Melissa:

He was between 65 and 70. I do not remember exactly what age he was, but it was pretty awesome because he did not have a problem telling my boss exactly how the fuck he felt, which was great because it was actually the same thing all of us were thinking. He just didn't care if he'd say it anyways, which was pretty funny. Well, it was important things. It was about important things. His truck needs to be safe and functional and there's shit that's broke on it that needs to be fucking fixed, and tie downs and the proper training and the proper way to tie down combines and 9Rs and all the shit that was really important. Pilot cars, because we hauled a bunch, we hauled combines. The dealership had their own trucking, which was Mike's job. And you had to have pilot cars and you had to have all kinds of and flags and oversized loads.

And we got away with doing the agriculture thing where you don't actually have to have permits or a CDL if you're hauling within, I think it's like 125 miles of your home base, as long as it's considered agriculture, which we were an agriculture dealership, but still, if we were hauling out of state, which we were right on the Colorado border so we did it all the time. He got on our boss about permits and about pilot cars and all this proper shit that you need, which the previous truck driver just didn't give a shit. He'd just haul anything and just didn't give a shit.

Eugene Torkelson:

Well I know the first, oh, 10 years or so, 10, 12 years where I worked at was a family owned business and there really wasn't a benefit package at all. We had health insurance through my wife's office and there, it was a good place to work, fantastic place to work. But no retirement, nothing like that to build up. It was on you. I had never thought about that. Well, then I went to work for John Deere and we had 401k with matching and all that and some investments and stuff. And so I didn't start anything at all until I was ... I would've been 30 something and then I ran my own business.

I was still putting a little away, but there still wasn't what I would call adding to that retirement as much is what my wife where she worked at, she had KPERS, which is Kansas, I can't remember what it's for, but it's a retirement program and it's mainly through government school districts, the county, cities, stuff like that, has that. And now that I'm on the county, I'm contributing into that program and our secretary tells me I can retire in eight years, because I have my points in. Well, it won't be a very hefty retirement because I've only been putting into it for six years so far.

So like I said, if you can start that young, that'll build up. I mean, somebody going into the county right now saying they're mid-twenties or so, or even maybe a little older, by 55 or 60, they got full retirement benefits. That's great. I just tell everybody I'm going to work till noon the day of my funeral. Yep,

Melissa:

Yep, yep, yep. Well obviously my ex at the time did not stay with the city job that he had. He had some issues with the mechanics he was working with were trash, most of them were trash. And it's impossible to fire anybody in that situation because they have the, what's it called? Union, they had the union and stuff like that. So he was just tired of working with people that didn't deserve to be there and didn't want to be there and just floated along doing pretty much nothing, still getting the same, paid the same wage that he was.

So he didn't stay, but his mother was also working for the city and she had worked, she busted her ass to get to where she was and to get the position she had with no college background or anything. And she ended up, she was making pretty good money and she had her retirement in to where you make 80%, I think. When you retire you make 80% of your highest wage that you've held for two that you held for two years or more. That's freaking good. Yeah, that is really good. There is no other retirement thing I know of, but that is good.

And she worked up to having a really decent hourly wage too. But I think you're right. I've actually seen the exact scenario you're talking about where we had a guy at one of the old shops I worked at that left us to go work for the county and he worked there for a few months and the wage cut was so drastic that he couldn't actually afford his monthly bills. So then he came back to the dealership after that. But I'm not so sure that he didn't really pay attention to the benefits he was getting from the county and really pay attention to, because from what I've heard, government jobs are the best way to retire. They've got the best benefits when it comes to things like that.

Eugene Torkelson:

And some of the things that's hard is, I don't know, at your dealership, are you paid every week or every two weeks?

Melissa:

Two weeks.

Eugene Torkelson:

They were paid once a month.

Melissa:

Oh really?

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah. So you've got to budget that stuff. A lot of times you got to set when your payments come out and stuff like that because yeah, you're paid once a month. We are, anyway. That's the way ours is ran. And I went from running my own shop to working down there, so there wasn't as much of a transition in that. But somebody's coming from someplace where they're getting paid weekly or every two weeks and then having to stretch that or learn how to stretch that out so that you still have your bills paid but only get it once a month and you have your house and your car payment come out at the wrong time, all of a sudden you're broke and you got another week left to make your money stretch. So there's a little bit to that. There's some people that just can't seem to get their finances in line for a monthly pay like that.

Melissa:

Yeah, I've never heard of that before. Even the government jobs that I've known people to work in pay every two weeks. But that would be hard to budget. I've gotten paid biweekly my entire career with the exception of the ag dealership I worked at before I started working at Diesel Laptops. They paid weekly, which I had never had before. But weekly comes with a whole new perspective of, especially I own a house, I have owned a house for the last seven years of my life and when it comes down to your mortgage payment, you get paid. I was getting paid about a thousand bucks a week. And sometimes it's kind of easy to just blow that because you have it, right? It's kind of easy to just blow it.

Then when your mortgage payment comes up, granted I have my own personal business that is a very healthy addition to my wages, but if that would've been the only money I was making at all, I would've had to really, because it's the exact opposite effect to where you're only getting paid ... if you're getting paid weekly, you're getting paid less money at one time. So if you just blow it may not seem like you're blowing that much, but then you get towards the end of the month and it's time to pay your mortgage for the first of the month. You may not have that money in your account.

Every two weeks is the best way to do that because the way I have my finances set up is I can pay my mortgage. My mortgage can be completely paid with one paycheck if it's a biweekly paycheck. So I just make sure that that last paycheck of every month is for the mortgage. So that's how I do it. But obviously, the way everybody likes to do their finances is different. And I did not have to pay health insurance on my own up until recently. So that was a whole nother thing of money coming out of my account that I'm not used to, that I have to account for. So I don't know if you've got anything to add on that you want to talk about the health insurance and paychecks and really paying attention to what you're getting into in a job.

Eugene Torkelson:

Well, no, I think we've talked about that pretty much. I know one of the other things you always talk about is how to get people interested in the industry. Again, I went to vo-tech here and my original intent was to take all their mechanics courses. They had auto, at that time they called it farm mechanics and diesel. And I took the first year of the farm mechanics, then I took auto mechanics and they were going to let me get into the second year of diesel without having to take the first year. And I wound up getting married instead. Just, it was the right thing to do.

Melissa:

Well life, you work to live, right? You don't live to work.

Eugene Torkelson:

You've been married 42 years now, so ...

Melissa:

That's awesome.

Eugene Torkelson:

And it was a vo-tech then and now it's a tech college. I'm glad I went through it when it was a vo-tech.

Melissa:

So you didn't have any, I take it, when you went through vo-tech. That didn't have the normal college classes. It was probably just ...

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah, now they have to have their social science, their English and that. I didn't have that.

Melissa:

Yeah, I agree.

Eugene Torkelson:

[inaudible 00:35:21] involved. And my original intent was to take all those, go back to my hometown and start up my own job. Life changes, and that's something else people need to realize. Yeah, you've got goals and you've got it all planned out. Something's going to throw you a curve and you're going to have to adapt.

Melissa:

Yep. The beauty about the diesel industry is you can get a job wherever the fuck you want, now.

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah, now you can. Yeah. And me and my wife both graduated vo-tech, she went through the business and she was at the same place for 40 years and retired from it and she worked her way up through it. She didn't stay in the same position, but she didn't move. Now my life, we throw in the blender about every 10 years and hit puree. I worked for one place for 10 years and then went back into automotive and about a year and a half and things have changed in 10 years.

Melissa:

Oh, I bet. I bet, emissions and all kinds of stuff.

Eugene Torkelson:

Being a line mechanic and trying to catch up on 10 years and they think you ought to do that in about two weeks of schooling and that didn't work. So I went back into lawn and garden again and went to work for John Deere with our John Deere dealer and I was with them for 13 years and went through training. You talk about cornerstones or something or what?

Melissa:

Capstones?

Eugene Torkelson:

Capstones.

Melissa:

Yeah. That's on the yellow side of John Deere. Yeah, they do. The green side doesn't do that.

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah. But I went through their hydraulics and electrical training. I was-

Melissa:

All the corn classes.

Eugene Torkelson:

When they had the skid loaders out in Loudon, Tennessee, I was in the first school out there and I was in the last school out there before they moved them.

Melissa:

Well that was probably for skid loader or skid steerers and-

Eugene Torkelson:

That's when they came out. They were just-

Melissa:

Mini excavators. Did you have to do capstones for those on the ag side?

Eugene Torkelson:

I don't remember anything called capstones. But yeah, it was just at the end of when New Holland was building them and Deere was just putting their engines in.

Melissa:

Oh, that's a long time ago. Okay. Yeah.

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah. 5575, stuff like that. And then I was out there for the very first when the 250 or the 50 series came out, when Deere started building their own.

Melissa:

What do you think about that fuel rack idea that John Deere put in the motherfucking engines with the unit pumps?

Eugene Torkelson:

The new ones?

Melissa:

The older ones, they're the mechanical ... Well, I guess like the 250 and the 333 CT skid loaders, where they had the unit pumps and nozzles and then they had a mechanical fuel rack that you had to time and adjust each fuel pump for.

Eugene Torkelson:

I never-

Melissa:

You remember that?

Eugene Torkelson:

I never got into that.

Melissa:

Oh, you're lucky. I fucking hated those. Well, they were literally unit pumps, kind of like the D series. Have you worked on the D series at all?

Eugene Torkelson:

Probably not.

Melissa:

The D series is the electronic version, but instead of having one fuel pump that feeds injectors, it has a fuel pump for each individual cylinder. And those fuel pumps were ran off the camshaft. So they had cam loads. So they were ran off the camshaft, kind of timed by the camshaft, because it's just like valves. Exactly how it's set up, it's just like valves only for the fuel pump had his little roller and everything. And there's a fuel pump for each cylinder and then that fed an individual nozzle for each cylinder as well. There still was a little bit of timing that they needed in there.

So for this fuel pump, for the old ones, they had this fucking rack that went all the way down the side of all the unit pumps and there was these little tiny nubs in the fuel pumps, and they would hook into this rack. And the rack was connected to the fuel shutoffs solenoid and the governor springs and all that set up. And the rack would pull this little nub and it would twist on these unit pumps to advance or retard the timing of it. And dude, setting this shit up is like dial indicator super ... You have to use a dial torque wrench and you have to use a dial indicator and you have to set all this up. Oh my God.

I got good at it when I worked on the attic side because every fucking old farmer has one of those fucking things. And then they switched to the D series, which was then an electronic version of that. So they got rid of the fuel rail, the rail, the timing rack and shit like that. They got rid of all that shit and it was still unit pumps but it was electronic solenoid unit pumps. And then they had starting issues and the thing wouldn't start and the unit pumps and nozzles was just a horrible fucking idea. I believe the E series finally got into ...

Well, E series had issues with the hydraulics. They had a Yanmar, I believe. That's when they started putting Yanmars back in the skid steers and then they had hydraulic issues. So John Deere's just kind of gone through this cycle of they either have a really shitty engine or they have a really shitty hydraulic system for their skid steerers and it's like this back and forth fucking disaster. But their new G series, from what I understand, is pretty good. So the only thing I've done on those is fuel pumps and shit, because those are common really.

Eugene Torkelson:

We've got a skid loader at work. And I really liked the 250 or the 50 series when they had them. I thought they were pretty good. But these seem all right too.

Melissa:

The 250s, I'm trying to think. I'm pretty sure the 250 is the one with the ... Those have John Deere engines in it, right?

Eugene Torkelson:

Yes.

Melissa:

Yeah, those are the ones with the mechanical fuel fuel rack. And those were actually more reliable than the electronic unit pumps.

Eugene Torkelson:

The only thing I ever really had trouble with the engines on the 250s were the little rivet grommets on top of the injectors, on the injector lines. We had a bunch.

Melissa:

Oh yeah.

Eugene Torkelson:

The seal, they'd get loose or something or blow out and we replaced those. And other than that, hydraulics and the motherboards on the dash seem to be the biggest problem.

Melissa:

Yep. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Eugene Torkelson:

And New Holland had the same exact thing in those 55 series and Deere had to have the same boards and stuff like that in theirs. But for some reason New Holland, they never had service bulletins out and never had any problems. They just said every call. Well, Deere got tired of doing their work for them is what it amounted to, I think.

Melissa:

Yep. I've replaced lots of those monitor control unit things and the mold skid steers. They can cause all kinds of weird wacky shit.

Eugene Torkelson:

Break all of a sudden sets and won't start and yeah, it's fun to diagnose.

Melissa:

Oh yeah. Especially because those old wiring schematics are not near as great as the new ones.

Eugene Torkelson:

We had one skid loader that when they first came out with those, you had to be a skid loader dealer in order to sell one. And there was only three in the state of Kansas and I had one that I had to drive almost four hours one way to work on it. Made it a day long job to go down and do what was warranty work and maybe work on it for a half hour or an hour, but it was still a day full day to go to work.

Melissa:

That's how everything was in Wyoming. Because everything's so spread out, everything's at least an hour away. But yeah, that skid loader. The skid steerers and stuff like that, obviously on the construction side we deal a lot with those. Those are the smallest things we have on the construction side. But that and the mini excavators, which I'm not a fan of.

Eugene Torkelson:

I've never even ran one of those yet.

Melissa:

I would much rather work on a 350 GLC or an 870, 87 metric ton large mining excavator than touch a mini excavator. But that's just how I've always been. I like the big shit. But I told you my little background story, I'm the only lawnmower I've ever worked on in my life and I'm going to show everybody exactly how that turned out. I don't know if you can see that. This is a piston from one of them triple deck John Deere lawnmowers that obviously ate a valve. And I told him earlier it had a crack this big down to parent bore block. So that was fun. And that was a learning experience on the fuel timing that I had fucked up from when I took it apart and didn't take it apart. Learning experiences.

Yeah, that was the last time I ever touched a lawnmower. I did touch a lawn and turf garden size tractor a couple of times after that, but I did not touch it. I commend you guys that work on lawnmowers because I can't do it. I don't have the fucking patience for it and I'd much rather work on the big shit. I'm small and I'd much rather work on the big shit.

Eugene Torkelson:

That's what I would run into a lot. Guys would bring their lawnmowers in, say, "I can't mess with this." And they work on their truck all the time. They got a semi they work on all the time and "It's like an engine, dude."

"I ain't messing with it."

Melissa:

Yep. That's how I am. I told you I'd rather split the most pain in the ass tractor to split on the planet that's a large size tractor than touch another lawn. I fucking hate them things, but it's probably because I just don't have the experience in it. All of my experience has been from the time I was 18, 19, all of my experience has been heavy duty, all of it. My schooling was all heavy duty. My schooling was all semis, actually. And then I spent four months working on semis and then I went right into a John Deere dealership and I've worked at a John Deere dealership ever since and mostly construction dealerships. And because of my construction background, when I went to start at an ag dealership for the first time, they just threw me into the heavy shit because they're like, "Well, you already know how to work on the heavy shit, so we're going to throw you into the heavy shit."

And that's what I did was I mainly specialized in tractors at both of the ag dealerships I worked at. I specialized in the 7Rs or the 7,000 series and up, some of the older stuff, which I don't even know how to fucking categorize all the models like the 4044s and all that stuff are the size of a 7R-ish. But that's pretty much all I worked on was tractors, and a combine here and there, and some swathers here and there, but mostly tractors. So the lawnmower thing is just not ... I don't like it.

Eugene Torkelson:

Well, and like I said, I was starting from ground zero, really, five, six years ago, because learning about the after treatments and just the more into the diesel engines, we wound up overhauling an N14 out of the Peterbilt that I drove and that was fun. It was timing the camshaft and stuff and setting your follower plates, your timing and then on it. It was interesting. It was a little nerve wracking. And then when we hit that switch and she fires up, it just makes your heart feel so good.

Melissa:

Yep. The first startup after doing any kind of major engine work is the best. And doing actual rebuilds nowadays, I don't consider short blocks or long blocks a rebuild. That is not a rebuild. And to do an actual rebuild where you're doing jugs and you're doing the rotating assembly and bearings and all that shit, that's pretty rare to be able to do nowadays. And I've done a couple professionally. Most of mine have been my own shit, but I love it, engine work. Everybody loves engine work. Every mechanic wants to do engine rebuilds.

Eugene Torkelson:

Where we do our own work and we work on all our equipment ourselves. We hardly send anything out anymore.

Melissa:

Well you guys are kind of private in a sense though. You're not like a dealership in a sense where warranty matters, right?

Eugene Torkelson:

We now warranty stuff. We have our Cat motivators, we have Cat come over and do any of the warranty work. We have a service program that we do up to a certain amount of time where they do the work and supply the filters and all that and then we take over after that. But they used to send our semis and our dump trucks out because there was stuff that without a computer we couldn't deal with. We couldn't reset. When you do the after treatment, you have to do that. There's a proportion valve in there that you have to set. Well without having a computer to plug into, you're at the dealer's mercy.

Melissa:

I've done many of field calls over to counties and cities to just like, they've already done the work like injectors and shit like that. All they need is a reprogram or a calibration. I've done lots of little throw my computer and a couple tools in the back of the parts truck and head over to the county and at least you guys do the work though.

Eugene Torkelson:

Well, we got worked over by a dealer a couple of times really good. And I mentioned I just went out there and that's how I found Diesel Laptops was just happened to come across it and it was when they were fairly new. And to tell you the truth, it really sounded too good to be true. I looked to get Cummins, to get Kenworth, to get Cat, to get all the different brands. And if you went out there, you're spending gobs of money, and then don't update $2,000 every year for every single program, then just you're off. Well then with Diesel Laptops, it was a lot of money up front. You don't have to update it. We do the yearly premium update for it. I think it's $1,900 or something like that. And that way we get the updates, monthly updates and everything and we get the health and stuff. But that's all new to me. And being how I was the one that suggested it, I guess I'm the one that gets to run the computer, so I'm having to learn all this stuff.

Melissa:

So what I actually would love to talk to you about that, one of the first customers I've ever had that has a Diesel Laptops that also worked at a dealership. So I tried to look at the diesel repair website and stuff like that. I didn't see a goddamn thing on John Deere. Which is fine, just that's the only thing I know how to compare it to is John Deere. And so what is your perspective on the manuals and the diagnostics that they provide versus you've worked at a dealership, you've had the dealership support, you've had the dealership technology and you've worked with that. So how would you compare that? Because I'm actually curious to know that.

Eugene Torkelson:

I think that we are actually not using the computer as well as we should be or could be. Part of it is that we haven't had time to just play with it. Every time we do something on it, we seem to learn more about it. When we first hooked up, when we got our new one, we'd had it three years and we got our new computer. Every three years you get a new computer and we hooked up to one of our John Deere tractors and it wouldn't let us, it just said it didn't read anything. Well, I contacted them and they said, no it should. And of course all the people on the internet say, "Nope, nope, can't do that. Can't do that."

Yeah, you can. And they're advertising that they're working on John Deere and it was just something that when we got our new computer, they didn't get turned on. The guy fixed it in about five seconds back, got access to our computer. He said, oh there it is. And so we were able to hook up and then see what our problems were. We've been real happy with what we can get.

Melissa:

You don't have to try and sell it to me. I'm just curious to know your honest opinion

Eugene Torkelson:

Now I worked for, like I said, for John Deere Lawn and Garden for 13 years and they have really good flow charts I think in their manuals.

Melissa:

For diagnostics?

Eugene Torkelson:

Yes. But you start at number one and you go through it. You don't go and say, "Oh well, I'm fine, I'll go to number five," because you're done then. It will lead you astray almost every time if you skip a step, like we found out. And the laptops, like I said, I know we're not using it to its full potential and I hope to get better at it, but I'm learning all kinds of things from day one. You're talking about a CAN bus? I don't have no idea what that is. Multiplexing. I haven't learned what that is yet.

Melissa:

I don't even know what multiplexing is.

Eugene Torkelson:

There's two protocols. I can't remember what the numbers are now, but a 19 or an 1800 something and it makes a big difference on sometimes from what I've seen, which one you select and the-

Melissa:

Like the J1939 versus the other?

Eugene Torkelson:

And I'm not familiar with all that stuff really well yet.

Melissa:

So you would probably have a hard time with ... John Deere only had one diagnostic port, one type of diagnostic port. So do you think that Diesel Laptops, obviously you don't know what a CAN bus track was, right? You've only learned, do you think that Diesel Laptops does it justice on helping to with theories of operations in the same manner that or close to the same manner that a dealership software would?

Eugene Torkelson:

I think so because, well, like I said, I don't think we need to do better with using what they have to provide for us.

Melissa:

I mean, dealership mechanics do the same shit, right?

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah. You've got to figure out and you've got to go through and this will tell you what your codes are. It will let you go in and see perimeters. It'll let you do, there's some things you can change or some things can't. One of the things that we probably need to access is where we have access to the web access through it and we don't. And it's a little extra money to do that, which I don't know whether we'll ever be okayed to do that or not, but getting into some of the fault codes and things like that, it's so much nicer. They give you an idea, they give you breakdowns, that give you flow charts through things. Their wiring diagrams are pretty good. They're not necessarily what you get with the dealerships. I think they're simplified them a little bit.

Melissa:

Good. That's actually good. Complex is not always the best answer. That's good.

Eugene Torkelson:

They've done their own and they're a little bit of color coded. They're easier to follow through.

Melissa:

Yeah. Well you're used to the ag side schematics, and I'm going to tell you this right now from working on both sides, the ag side manuals and schematics are, you would think it was a different company wrote it, compared to the construction side. The construction side, especially for wiring diagrams, is so much fucking easier. But the problem with John Deere is, I can't tell you how many times I've ran into diagrams and John Deere itself, this is John Deere itself that I've ran into diagrams that are incorrect and they lead you down a rabbit hole where their wires aren't there and you contact DTAC and you're like, what the fuck?

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah. They don't like it when you point out their mistakes either. We were at electrical service school and me and another kid got paired up and this kid was sharp. He'd taken over a shop from an older guy that he'd worked for and he worked on everything from semis to chainsaws and he was sharp and they had us follow through a electrical schematic and they said, follow this out and trace it all out, what the power side and all this is. And everybody else was done and we worked and we just looked each other and says, this doesn't work. Because as soon as you went through and tripped a relay, you sent all the power to a direct ground. It was shorted out.

Melissa:

What the hell is supposed to happen.

Eugene Torkelson:

He, of course, the guy up there, the instructor, all the rest of them have it and he says, "You guys having some trouble, need a little help?" And says, "Well no, that doesn't work." He says, "Sure it does. It's right out of the manual." He says, "We've been teaching it for three years." It was on a 333 or something, a bigger lawn tractor. And we said, "No, it won't because," and we explained, "As soon as you trip that relay, you're sending everything to direct ground." I said, you're asking for a short." He looks at it and his head and he looks at it says, "My God, you're right."

Melissa:

Yeah.

Eugene Torkelson:

Been teaching them for years.

Melissa:

Well these fucking teachers are, for the most part, these fucking teachers for these classes are beginner engineers and they send them through all these fucking trainings. You get a veteran engineer into DTAC or into those training classes, it's great. But that's not usually what happens. It's usually the beginners, the beginner engineers have to go through these capstone trainings and these basics trainings and stuff like that before they can. So it's like the blind leading the blind sometimes in an aspect of it. And the best trainings I've ever had were in-house instructors that were old mechanics of 20, 30 year old mechanics that went through all the trainings and then taught in-house classes, were certified to teach. That and the Cummins class that I did through John Deere, I did for the 9R tractors and the Ford harvesters, they have the QSX15 in them.

And to get the scraper tractor series capstone, you have to have that Cummins QSX engine certification. That certification class, only because it was led on by Cummins people was the best training class I've ever had through John Deere. The best, hands down the best. But like you said, they get in there and I've ran into it with DTAC too, where I'm looking at a schematic that's straight out of, because you know how John Deere has a diagnostic procedure for a code and it'll have a couple wiring schematics attached to that that you can look at, little tiny ... It broke the system up into little pieces and it's like, here's this wiring schematic for this little piece of this diagram and here's this and here's ... Well, I'd be going off of those on some of my stuff and I'm looking at these because most of them are just little pins, the pin numbers and locations from this connector to this connector and the wire colors and all that shit.

And that's what I would use a lot to diagnose because you always start big. If you know have a problem on a wire, you start big and then you work in to try and figure out where that break is or whatever. I can't tell you how many times I've been led astray completely the fuck astray because the wiring numbers and coatings and colors and pin numbers that they have in that little schematic was a generic schematic, not that machine specific one. And it just would leave me way the fuck astray. So then I'd contact DTAC, and you'd list out everything you've done, all the steps you've taken, all the readings you've had and everything and they're like, "You're not even on the right schematic. This is actually the right schematic." And then they send you a link to a different part of the theory of operation or a different CTM, component technical manual for the right schematic.

And you're like, "Well what the fuck? Why couldn't you just put that schematic in here? But you know what, what really happened when they updated the Service Advisor 5. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Service Advisor 5.

Eugene Torkelson:

No.

Melissa:

Were you around with that? Okay, so Service Advisor 4, which I'm sure is what you were used to, the actual computer program that was not online, that you had to go through service performance to do updates and stuff like that. The old Service Advisor, I'm sure is what you're used to, which I worked with for about a year before they switched to Service Advisor 5. And Service Advisor 5 is kind of nice because you can search things and it's linked to DTAC and it's linked to all this other stuff. But I feel like the manuals that were linked into the schematics and that were linked into the codes and stuff and their original service advisor.

I don't know if 4 or 3, or whatever that original Service Advisor was called, was much more accurate than all these hyperlinked manuals that they have now in Service Advisor 5. But I love Service Advisor 5 for reprogramming stuff is easy. The only problem is they have an 18,000 step, which they finally started to get rid of and make it simplified. But when they first came out with Service Advisor 5, reprogramming an ECU for an engine you rebuilt or replaced was a fucking nightmare. A fucking nightmare.

Eugene Torkelson:

I know when I worked for John Deere, it was in the '90s, so I don't think I was ever involved with Service Advisor. I had a computer, but it was a desktop computer just to do parts lookup and stuff like that.

Melissa:

Oh, okay. So you guys didn't have Service Advisor at Holden?

Eugene Torkelson:

Not long, but DTAC was, I don't know what your opinion of DTAC was, but ours is, like you said, they're engineers. They're not mechanics. You'd call in and like, "We've never heard of that before. Let us know when you figure it out and let us know what you found." So a lot of times we got to do their work for them is what I felt.

Melissa:

Yeah. Well the engineers don't understand. When mechanics look at something that's wrong with the machine, they're automatically, their brain's going through what's actually possible to be wrong and what's not. And what I feel like DTAC does sometimes is they have engineers that just have you test a bunch of random that has nothing to do with what the fuck you're looking at and it's just a waste of time. And we had a couple issues of, we had this motor grader that had auto, you're probably not going to be familiar with this, but it had auto grade, like the pro grade or whatever it's called.

Eugene Torkelson:

I found one podcast, yeah.

Melissa:

And it wasn't the smart grade with the top on stuff on it. It was just the stock smart grade on the grader. And what it would do is you would start grading and the guy had a set-up to where he controlled one side and then the other side with auto controlled. That's how those were. And it would sit there and it would hunt and it would leave ripples into the dirt. Oh my fucking God. We spent, as a dealership and John Deere, who actually came out to our dealership to try to help us with this, took us three months to figure it out. Three months.

We tried every type of reprogramming and all the shit, and we finally, I don't even remember what it was because it wasn't my machine to work on, but it was something with, there was a tiny little stick in one of the control valves for this pressure or something like that, but it took us and John Deere like three months to figure it out. It was a fucking nightmare. But they did the same thing where you were testing a bunch of that didn't even fucking make sense. It wasn't even relevant to the ... I don't know. Sometimes you get people in there that are great and other times it's not so much.

Eugene Torkelson:

I'm a little impressed about with Diesel Laptops is when you call in, you can talk to a mechanic and it just seems like things get done quicker and in a more logical fashion, and we've only had to use that a couple of times. Usually it gives us enough information, we can figure it out. But we have had a couple things where we just did not have access to mainly the right wiring diagrams and the right way of working through, I think it was on our T800 Kenworth, and we called him up and he says, "Well, let me get back to you." And he's not blowing smoke. He said, "I don't know off the top of my head, but I'll find out and I'll give you a holler back." And, oh, I don't know, hour or so, and he was back and had an answers for us or places for us to go look that we hadn't thought of trouble with. We got it fixed. I've been real impressed with their technical health side, both in the computer side and in the mechanical side.

Melissa:

So I'm glad to hear that. I mean, like I said, my being born and raised in a sense in dealership and never leaving a dealership, I never got the chance to experiment with any kind of aftermarket stuff. And obviously I don't have anything to hook up with here. So it's not like I can just try it myself and see. I would love to. I would love dig through their fucking programming and just sit there and play on it, but can't. I'm supposed to be traveling there hopefully soon, but ...

Eugene Torkelson:

We haven't hooked up much on CAT yet because most anything we have problems with so far has been under warranty and just kind of hate to hook up and maybe mess something up. So we don't do that, but I'm kind of looking forward to that. And I haven't had to hook into any of our case equipment yet, but our trucks we've done are internationals with ... Oh, I'll get it wrong, ISM 385s, does that sound right?

Melissa:

The ISM, the new one? The brand new engine?

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah. These are 2005, 3 and 5 engines.

Melissa:

ISX maybe?

Eugene Torkelson:

And I thought that was ISM, but

Melissa:

I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I'm not familiar with large Cummins except for, I thought it went from the DT or the N14, I thought directly after that N14 series was the ISX, but I could be wrong, honestly. I probably am. I don't know. But I know the new engine is not an ISX anymore. The brand new one.

Eugene Torkelson:

No, our, let's see, our Kenworth, one of them has a ... I know the 13, is it ISM13 and then the newest one has a Paccar in it. And the oldest one, we have a couple old freight liners. One has a CAT, one has an N14. Then my Peterbilt had an N14.

Melissa:

I had an old five ton military truck with the ancient version of an N14. That was cool. It had the three individual heads and it was, yeah, I don't remember exactly what the model of that engine was, but it was pretty much an N14. It's cool as fuck. I miss that truck.

Eugene Torkelson:

Like an 855. It was a Versatile tractor, probably.

Melissa:

Yes. Actually, that sounds familiar. That sounds familiar.

Eugene Torkelson:

Basically the same engine.

Melissa:

Yeah, it was exactly, it looked exactly like an N14. It just wasn't an N14. But you could have high flow and low flow cooling systems and all kinds of shit that ... I loved that truck, but I had to get rid of it, which, my neighbor has a junkyard full of the motherfuckers. So one day I will have another one.

Eugene Torkelson:

Yeah.