Muddle of the road

Hans Zundel of Premier Automotives in Fort McMurray, AB, routinely faces some hard-driven vehicles that take more than a little TLC to bring them back to working condition. Up in the northern oil fields of Alberta, heavy duty pick-ups and four-wheel-drives are the vehicles of choice. And when they run into trouble in the field, they can be a particular challenge to fix.

This 2005 Dodge pickup came in on a flat bed with a simple request on the work order: "Check fuel leak."

There was so much mud on the vehicle it was hard to see what was going on. Once they got the mud off it, they were shocked to see what had caused the oil leak.

"These guys must have been driving through some pretty thick mud when a tree trunk just speared the gas tank," says Hans. "It was about four feet long when we saw it – but it probably started out longer and broke off as they drove. It’s sort of hard to imagine that they didn’t notice anything or figured it out, but I got the impression they were being a little tongue-in-cheek when they dropped it off. They kind of knew what they’d done, but they weren’t saying too much."

It was just another day’s work on a hard-driven vehicle working in punishing conditions.

"These guys are taking their trucks in places where they should be working with track vehicles," says Hans. "We’re often left to figure out what really happened and it can be a bit of fun. We usually ask them to clean them before we get them but if they’ve broken down, we have to chip away at the mud to find the truck."

Hans says he sees a lot of pattern failure: suspensions that have bottomed out so hard that the frame is bent& axles and rims bent& many cases that can only be described as heavy abuse.

"I worked with a fellow for a while who now works for one of the oil companies on site. He says they’ve started replacing the plastic skid plates on the Chevy pickups with steel ones that they fabricate themselves. The drivers are even destroying those. They routinely replace complete front axles that were literally torn out of the vehicle."

It makes for steady work for technicians.