A local municipality needed help repairing an ‘over-the-rail’ mower attachment. It was well past it’s useful life, but due to budget constraints, the town need to get at least another year out of it. The problem was, a hydraulic cylinder had failed on this 30-year-old machine. After dropping it off to be repaired, we did a ‘D&I’ — a disassemble and inspect. What we found was that, for a cylinder this size with the amount of problems it had, it was a more economical move to purchase a new one. Typically, in these situations, it saves the customer money to have a new one instead of having us rebuild it to ‘like new’ condition. But it seemed that this cylinder must’ve been made out of ‘unobtanium.’ Actually, it was worse: the company had made the mower so long ago, they had no record of what type of cylinder was needed and didn’t keep a stock of replacement cylinders in-house.
We told the customer what was the situation, and they told us that’s a problem. We had to understand, the grass keeps growing and they really needed the machine back in service in jiffy. Remember, they had no money budgeted for a new mower. And they couldn’t get a replacement for it. It was a conundrum. We let the customer know, however, that this is another reason why working with us is ‘simply Devine.’
We told them that we could fabricate a new one out of material we stocked and it would work better than new and fit into the place from whence the original came. We got the go ahead to make the new one and the town maintenance garage got their cylinder two days later. The only one that wasn’t happy was the grass – as you can see, it wants to grow and this mower would be back in duty, cutting it down to size!
