Bringing home the bacon

The past month has been endless travel for Dayven. He has been somewhere different every week -- Indiana, Alabama, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia. It is hard for me to keep it all straight.

These are pictures of his latest trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He was up there with the local Cat Dealer for the feature training and delivery of a new 994F wheel loader (pictured). It is the largest one that Cat makes and you can see by the picture of Dayven next to the tire, it's big! It is so large, it must be shipped in pieces on seven flatbed semis, then assembled onsite by the Dealer mechanic team. Once in production, it will run for 22 hours a day, being taken out occasionally for preventative maintenance. The mine has another wheel loader that has been running for almost 10 years. I won't tell you how much the new one cost, but you can imagine it's well into 7 figures.

LEFT: Dayven with the new machine.

BELOW: The maintenance crew with the old machine that has been running for 50,000 hours.

On the beach at Lake Huron, during a little downtime (notice the unmelted snow in the background).

Yesterday, he was on a whirlwind jaunt that had him in 3 states in one day - possibly a new record for him. He is working on a deal for a mining customer headquartered in St. Louis. The customer wanted to see some of the equipment in action so Dayven went with the Dealer on their plane and flew the customer to mines in Kentucky and Alabama, then back home, all in one day.