Stories from the Wall: the Grain Dryers - Harvest Times

I was quite young when this opportunity came along. I don’t think I was even in the company for a year when I got the phone call.

The company had a single phone line in and we might’ve had two phones (maybe only one). My remaining cofounder and I had just agreed the day before to continue on our entrepreneurial pursuit after an objective review of our business venture caused one of the other cofounders to choose a more certain source of income for his young family.

The call came from two people flying through London, Ontario, on their way home from a business trip somewhere in the Midwest US. Their company designed and manufactured an innovative grain dryer which operated at temperatures higher than traditional dryers. They had a problem that needed solving and they found our company name in the yellow pages.

They told me what they needed was a “scanner” and asked me if we could build one. I met them at the local airport for lunch, and they described the problem to me. Their dryer had 243 tubes that had to be monitored for temperature. Grain flowed through each tube, and if a tube got plugged with material, the temperature would rise beyond a setpoint, and the dryer would be shutdown until the tube was unplugged.

They had selected all the right devices (pyrometer, set-point device and printer) and planned to fully wire one of their newly built dryers with thermocouples properly positioned in every tube. All they needed was an automatic way to “scan” each of the thermocouples, which were spread over 3 stages on a dryer 80 feet high.

It seemed easy enough. I had a picture in my mind of how I would do it and sketched it out for them over lunch. They needed it quick. They had one dryer being installed in California and two others were ordered by the same customer, but their customer insisted an automatic “scanner” had to be included and was part of that deal.   

I told them I could build them a prototype in 3 weeks, and they gave me the “go ahead” on the spot. They sent all the selected devices to our shop along with a purchase order for the first one, that they would pay for whether it worked or not. When I had it built, they would come and inspect it in operation in our shop, and if it worked to their satisfaction, they would authorize us to ship it and at the same time, order 2 more

.

And that’s what happened.

I designed a main control board and “relay boards”. Each relay board had 16 sealed miniature relays and a 4 input to 16 output multiplex chips (all devices initially designed for telephone switching circuits, which I was exposed to through some early service work we did for Northern Telecomm – when they were still around).

The printed circuit board layouts were done by hand with tape on mylar and we etched the first few boards ourselves, before deciding to send the rest of them out to someone else.

It took me about a week to build every board by hand, assemble racks and mount them along with power supplies into industrial enclosures, and then wire backplanes from the circuit board racks to termination boards. Everything was connected and running when they inspected it, and shortly afterwards, it was shipped to California.

Two weeks later, I got an urgent call from California.

“It doesn’t work!”, my primary contact said. “What? What doesn’t work?”, I asked. “Nothing!”, he said, “nothing works. The printer doesn’t work, the LED display doesn’t work, and we don’t know if it’s ‘scanning’ the thermal couples”.

That last bit of information made it serious. If it wasn’t scanning, I thought, there was no way to detect plugged tubes. “Open the unit on the first stage” I instructed, “and tell me if you hear the relays picking”. When the system was running, you could hear each unit sequencing through all the miniature relays. Fifteen minutes later he was on the phone again.

“We got you a flight to Sacramento, connecting in Toronto and Chicago. I’ll pick you up in Sacramento. Your London flight leaves in 2 hours. Bring whatever you need to”.

And off I went on my first major business trip. I can’t say I was surprised. In fact, I believe I expected it - so much so that I didn’t ask the obvious questions. Somewhere between Chicago and Sacramento I thought of them.

“Did you plug the unit in?” I asked, as soon as I met him at the baggage claim.

To simplify things (inspections, approvals and onsite contract work), it was decided to put a standard electrical outlet inside of the main control cabinet and just plug my system into that standard 115 VAC outlet. All he had to do was open the main cabinet door and plug the unit in.

The look on his face told me the answer.  

Since I was out there, it was decided I should stay until the whole system was officially commissioned and accepted by the customer. I was OK with that. There were a lot of things I wanted to test out, and over the next few days, bugs did show up as well as things my customer and their customer wanted changed.

Over the next 4 years, my customer sold about a dozen of those dryers to customers across the US as well as internationally.

Most of them required me to be on-site for commissioning. For me, every “harvest season” brought with it an opportunity to travel and work with a great team of people, in places I’d otherwise have never seen, including Venezuela, where the first Spanish word I learned was “fuego!” – but I’ll leave that particular story for another time.

There’s a lot of luck involved in getting a business started. Sometimes it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and a small thing like a listing in the yellow pages is what brings the opportunity to your door. But, just as important as timing and happenstance is to a company’s eventual success, saying “yes” and taking on something very difficult that most others would take a pass on, is when luck gets converted to opportunity, and with opportunity comes the chance for success.  

To this day, I remember those years and times with thanksgiving. Harvest time is a special time for farmers, and for all of us. All the months of work and worry they put in is rewarded at harvest time. It takes some luck (weather, commodity prices) etc., but what it really takes is a lot of hard work, the courage to plant, and the commitment to see things through.

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(Being married to someone that encourages you to pursue your dreams - and to see them through - really helps too!)