Chapter 2

John's Millwrighting was born two months after the funeral; the sign said "IF WE CAN'T FIX IT - IT AIN'T BROKE."

The first year started out pretty slow; most of the work I did was for the mill. After Howard died and I left they had all kinds of problems and would hire me to go back and supervise shutdowns and major upgrades. Eventually different companies would hear about the magic I was able to do with vibration then have me come and see if I could do the same for them.

It was one of these emergency calls that really changed everything for me. A local power plant had heard of me and called me to look at one of their turbines. They had a serious vibration problem and no one had been able to fix it up until now. After looking at the site both with the turbine running and without it running I noticed that it wasn't so much the turbine that was vibrating it was the building. The building was resonant at exactly the same frequency as the turbine spun. The turbine was designed to spin at a certain speed to give exactly 60 hertz. So it was the building that had to change. I suggested that they start by gusseting all the beams in the building in order to change the resonant frequency.

The Power Company did not want to do it and brought in a couple of engineers to see if they could come up with anything else to try, they tried several different avenues in order to dampen the problem. After several weeks and thousands of dollars they came back to me and ask me to start the repairs as I had suggested. While making the changes I recommended, one of the welders found stress cracks in some of the beams causing us to replace them. I made sure that we replaced these beams with different lengths in order to change the frequency. After all the repairs were complete they started the turbine and found they had one of the smoothest running coal fired power plants in their system.

I was awarded a contract to look at all the power plants owned by Alberta Coal Power Corporation. The contract was worth two million dollars for the first year and one hundred thousand each year after that for maintenance. It was time to start hiring employees; I could tell it was going to get busy soon.

I started out small and hired 2 more millwrights that had impressive résumé's. By the end of the first year we had moved into a new building, hired a couple of machinists, a welder and 4 apprentice millwrights. We could barley keep up with all the customers. One of the apprentices came up with a new slogan "THE ONLY THING THAT SHOULD VIBRATE BELONGS BETWEEN YOUR LEGS... A HARLEY!". You could tell he was a biker. It never made it onto the sign but everyone seemed to know it.

We landed a contract to supply all the tradesmen for one of the larger lumber mill's major maintenance shutdowns. They were very impressed with our professionalism and hired us to supply all the maintenance people for their weekly shutdown day. We were getting bigger every time I turned around. We now had over 25 people full time and hired 50 part time and temporary people. We had 5 office staff looking after all the billing and the phones, I didn't get to leave the office much either as it seemed everything that happened needed to be looked at by me.

After we had missed out on a major contract because I didn't have the time to get back to the customer I decided it was time to hire an office manager. He had to be a millwright with good qualifications and an understanding of office management. I had just the right person in mind, Rick the millwright that bailed me out the second day on the job. I knew that Rick had left the mill and was working for a small company in the oil & gas industry. With very little investigation I heard that everything was not good with his job and he might be interested in a change.