Lee joined A.I.I. over fifteen years ago and quickly learned the ropes having been our general manager for the last decade. He has been a popular character to our customers over the years and has the most intimate knowledge of every aspect of our operation.

Unfortunately, Lee has tenured his notice and will be leaving us at the end of January. He and his wife Tara and son Cody are moving to Missouri to be closer to Tara’s family where they hope to live a simpler life after many years of shouldering the stress of a busy shop like ours. The good news is that Lee’s daughter Cassie will be staying on so we haven’t heard the last of the Schofields.

We want to wish Lee and his family the best of luck in Missouri and we are looking forward to hearing from him as our trails cross again later in his career. His new employer will be getting a very intelligent and self motivated man who no doubt will bring a new level of experience to their operation!

That’s right, our mechanics almost never use parts books or service manuals anymore preferring instead to utilize their own individual computer terminals that contain the equivalent of thousands of pages of data and no more finger prints! Not only that but the information is more current and they can network to our intercompany data making it possible to learn the whole history of the component they are rebuilding from start to finish.

We didn’t do it to be green, we did it because it’s faster and more efficient keeping our cost down so that we can be competitive! 

This rebuilt 992D transmission was the victim of some rough handling by the shipping companies.

-Looks like someone needs to put away the cell phone while he’s on that forklift.

Since this is a fairly late model transmission from a popular machine, we could not locate a used case and a new one from CAT® was $10,000!

At first we thought we were going to have to braze in a big patch involving lots of work and machining, but then we started noticing the similarities between this and a case from a much older application.

By simply replacing the dimensionally less critical valve section, we were able to completely avoid machine work and perform a far less technical repair saving the customer thousands!