Midas

Almost 14 years ago I got a call from Ingersoll Rand Compressor Division asking if I would call on a local Midas shop and take a look at their little problem. When I got there I met with the regional Manager at the time Mike Lucas. This shop had an Ingersoll Rand Compressor and when it came on the air system let out with a nerve wracking squeal. The pitch was so high that it effected the people inside the front office. The question to me was – What’s causing the noise and how do we fix it? Oh and how much will it cost?

We walked around the shop and discovered that they had also installed a cooling tower. A cooling tower is a tank with baffles inside and it is designed to bounce the air around, cool it and have the water condense inside so that it does not carry into the system and cause damage to the equipment. The noise? Well someone had installed a regulator before the cooling tower in order to control the pressure of the air being used in the shop. Normally a regulator will not cause a problem but when you reduce the pressure, you increase the velocity of the air and this increased velocity was resonating inside the cooling tower to produce this terrible noise.

The solution was simple. Call a plumber and have him move the regulator from before the Tower to after the Tower. The pressure is controlled and the noise is gone. Cost – Whatever the plumber charged. It was probably $100.00 in those days. We said NC from McBurneys,
have a nice day. How do you make a living doing things for free? Well that’s not the end of this story.

Within a week I got a call from Mike and he asked for an appointment. He showed up with his boss and they wanted to talk about a new working relationship between our companies. Would we be the recommended equipment supplier for Midas Canada? The answer was yes, of course and 14 years later, although Midas in Canada has had many changes, as have we, a relationship still exists between McBurney Sales and many of the top dealers in Canada. We have sold Midas dealers hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment over the years. That courtesy call was one of the most profitable calls in the history of our company.

Martin Muffler (#1 Midas dealer in North America for a single shop)
When Al Martin wanted to open his new store in Newmarket, Ontario he called us. We had a lot of competition for this prestige shop but in the end we had a working arrangement that saw us supply virtually all of the major equipment for his new shop. He took our advise when installing the air system and over the years Al has saved thousands of dollars with his alternating panel. He runs his 10 bay shop with twin 5 HP Ingersoll Rand compressors.

The second unit only comes on when the demand is more than one compressor can handle. Most of the time the hydro required to run the two fives is about 60% of the hydro required to run one 10 hp. Each time the compressors cycle, the one that started the last time will run second the next time. This spreads the wear out evenly and gives longer life to each compressor. He has an oxygen generator so that he does not have to purchase or store oxygen and pay the demurrage charges for the tanks. He has a natural gas booster so that he can use high-pressure natural gas with his cutting torches.

The cost compared to acetylene is virtually nothing. The extra gas he uses to run his torches would be less than a minimum charge in the summer. The equipment we supplied was the best quality available at the time and to this day he has not had to replace any major piece of equipment in that very active store. Al does many times the volume of an average Midas store and still has the number #1 shop in North America.