Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada — "As the economy goes, it's a great time to be a welder," remarked pipeline welding inspector Rob Koivuneva. Until recently, a journeyman welder with the right certifications could name their price to a potential employer in Alberta's oil sands projects.

However, as workers continue to arrive, such free-agent contract flexibility is not as readily found.

Rather than working directly for one of the oil companies, many welders come to Fort McMurray to work for oil sands-related operations such as Transwest Mining Systems, the local dealer for Komatsu trucks and a supplier of hydraulic shovels, rotary blasthole drills, and parts and service to open pit mines in Western Canada. Transwest's local shop can handle large component work such as repair and rebuild of truck bodies, Mine shovel buckets, dipper sticks and other large equipment as well as fabrication work such as dump truck boxes and buckets. The company also has a fleet of service trucks with combination welder/generator/air compressor rigs for field welding needs, such as when a heavy vehicle's track breaks.

R. McKenzie Welding & Fabrication Ltd. handles much of the same work as Transwest, but on a much smaller scale. Owner Ron McKenzie began in 1994 working with a portable welding rig off the back of a truck — now he oversees a crew of 12, half of whom work most of their time in the company's shop. The others work in the field, using the shop's five work trucks.

"I compete based on my team and I providing our customers with quality work and service," says McKenzie. "The majority of my customers I've had since 1994."

While McKenzie provides support for Finning, the Caterpillar equipment dealer in Fort McMurray, he also takes jobs for the local John Deere and Komatsu dealers, as well as for Hammer Equipment, a dealer in construction machinery manufactured by Case, Kobelco and others.

"Everybody in the area knows everybody else, so I don't ‘belong' to any single dealership, says McKenzie. "It's so busy that, when a dealer can get somebody to do work, they don't complain much."

Many of the newer trucks have cast steel frames, which calls for different techniques than the fabricated plate frames of 10 years ago, notes McKenzie. Equipment breakage occurs more frequently as the weather warms above –10 degrees C (14 degrees F), when more trucks are out and working.

McKenzie usually keeps at least one apprentice on staff at any time. He tends to be careful about job assignments, because if work slows down in the field, there has to be room in the shop to have the field guys working, rather than sitting at home and waiting for a phone call with an assignment. "They won't wait," emphasizes McKenzie, "they'll be on to the next job at another company."

While turnover doesn't tend to be very high, McKenzie notes that he tends to lose people either because the individual feels over-worked, or because the value of the crewperson's house has increased so much since its purchase that they sell, take the profits, and move back to where they came from. The latter was notable for McKenzie in 2005, as he lost five employees who made great profits on the real estate bought shortly after they first arrived years before.

The most recent investment McKenzie made was a diesel-powered Air Vantage 500 welder/generator with a gear-driven rotary screw compressor, manufactured by Lincoln Electric (www.lincolnelectric.com). The unit recently served on a field job that involved removing adapters on a mine shovel bucket that was more than 20 ft. wide, to create a straight edge. The operator using the Air Vantage rig worked twice as fast as a second worker who was using a 400A unit with an engine-driven compressor.

For other equipment, suppliers work with McKenzie's needs, and keep him posted on useful products arriving on the market. McKenzie uses a laptop computer for more than tracking jobs — a worker in the field can shoot digital pictures of a problem and send it from a client's field office. McKenzie can quickly examine the photos and develop a solution with the worker via cell phone, saving hours of travel time to and from job sites. The next step is equipping field crews with camera phones, McKenzie says.

Three supply shops currently keep equipment immediately on hand in Fort McMurray: BOC, Praxair and Air Liquide-Canada, the latter the largest of the three. Jamie Connors has worked at the Air Liquide store since 1998, and now oversees its operation.

Connors is keenly attentive to the special needs of every customer in the region, and he also keeps close track of every project so that he can provide and maintain the gases and equipment that are crucial to their success. Moreover, Connors has detailed, up-to-the-minute knowledge about the local communities and the effect the population explosion is having upon them. "If I don't understand people and human beings, at the end of the day I will not be able to continually grow," says Connors.

One "off-the-shelf" solution to a customer inquiry to Connors' staff was to develop a manifold that would hang off one side of a 16-bottle gas rack. The manifold, designed by Bob Olmstead (CET) of Omniweld Integrated Solutions (a division of Air Liquide), would allow several workers to tap into the gas supply, much like a temporary circuit breaker box supplies electrical power to workers on a construction site. Multiple gas tanks provide an alternative to having to work with a microbulk tank in the field, and the manifold permits individual bottles of gas to be switched out as they run dry. Demand for the manifold took off, so Air Liquide-Canada authorized Connors to have a shop produce more of the units so he could keep them on stock in his Fort McMurray store.