Riding with Jeff Malinowski, tour bus manager, was a treat. It was so exciting to join the bus on its maiden East Coast tour to see firsthand how the new wrap design would be received by our customers.Rice Lake distributors, their customers and technicians loved the wrap, however they were soon walking straight past the wrap to the Rice Lake expertise on board. After the tour and demonstrations, the Q&A began and Jeff Malinowski and Steve Delaney had answers for all.
Scale Service & Supply Co., Inc.
Rensselaer, New York
We are meeting owner Charlie Twiss, his daughter Lori, and son-in-law Dean Haita. After the tour of equipment, the conversation turns to the Certificate Retrieval System, a web-based calibration certificate software program. They have a client who manufactures silicone parts for the auto industry. Beside three truck scales and a brace of DeckHands, the client has 320 scales that have to be calibrated every month.
Dean remembers the switch from paper to PDAs. “The first time Scale Service & Supply used the Certificate Retrieval System, the technicians came back to the shop at noon. We asked them what they were doing back so soon. It usually took them until three or four o’clock to completely finish all the paperwork. They were done before noon and had the afternoon open for other calls. “We dock the PDAs and the data is posted on our website.”Not only was the calibration and data management more efficient, Scale Service & Supply cleaned out a long bookshelf. Dean recalls, “They had two shelves all the way around his office filled with binders of calibration certificates. Now they’re empty. He donated the binders to a school.”
Pro-Tech Scale Service
Amsterdam, New York
Craig Boehler, president, and Marie Boehler, the manager who manages most everything, are hosting a lunchtime picnic with the tour bus as the star attraction. They have invited customers from gravel quarries and waste plants, along with the county Weights & Measures Department folks. All are encouraged to take the tour and tuck into the largest Subway® sandwiches I have ever seen.
The picnic table talk then turns to single-point grounding, especially grounding in gravel. One of the Weights & Measures Department directors claims, “One of the biggest problems is having load cells knocked out by electrical storms.”That is all it takes to start Jeff extolling Rice Lake’s five-year protection warranty. “We put $500 worth of surge protection into our truck scale systems. Our single-point ground system and transient protection have eliminated lightning concerns. If our transient protection senses anything over 30 volts, it automatically shorts to ground. Sometimes a component may be sacrificed, but that is better than taking out a load cell.
“Even with $500 worth of hardware, it doesn’t do any good if you don’t have a good single-point ground. We want the indicator grounded to the same ground as the truck scale, the remote display and the printer. We send along with our truck scales 100 feet of copper wire for that purpose. Picture a lightning strike a mile away. It travels through the ground to your grounding rod where you can get an extremely high-voltage surge. The copper wire makes an easier path for the spike to dissipate.”
Neil Daley, director of the Fulton County Department of Weights & Measures, says it is hard to get a good ground in gravel. “I know a guy who has to water the ground when a storm is coming.” Someone suggests drilling a well to get to water and a more permanent ground or using the utility ground.
I make a note to send them Rice Lake’s white paper on single-point grounding.
Jeff adds, “Maintenance is the biggest plus point to keeping any truck scale running. Our truck scales are much easier to maintain. We don’t have bumper bolts to get hung up. We have rock guards to keep out debris so it doesn’t freeze. Our portable scale has sectional clean-out plates. It is wide enough to get a shovel in there, and there aren’t any electronics to get in the way.”
