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Hot Springs man makes gravel gold and builds a nationally recognized company in a rural community

Rock business flourishes with entrepreneur’s invention

HOT SPRINGS – When Don Theeler, a road-machinery manufacturing executive and mechanical engineer from Oregon, happened through Hot Springs one hot and dusty Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1996, Homesteaders’ Days, the town’s annual summer festival, was in full swing.

By JOHN STROMNES of the Missoulian

Like many tourists, he dropped by the rodeo, cruised down Main Street, glanced at a real estate sales flier, and headed off for Columbia Falls, where he had a business appointment the next day.

But as he drove north, Theeler marveled at how cheap real estate prices were in the tiny community on the western edge of the Flathead Reservation. Land and improvements seemed literally dirt cheap compared to real estate in Oregon.

So on impulse, he turned his car around and drove back to Hot Springs to find out.

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(This is an excellent example of why bringing in entrepreneurs who can develop new companies and business models is a major opportunity for rural communities. Take a look at http://www.comehomemontana.org for a model that brings back the best and the brightest.- Russ)

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"If you want to know something in a small town, you go to the local barbershop or the local watering hole," recalled Theeler, now one of Hot Springs’ most successful entrepreneurs, and the founder and owner of western Montana’s largest machine shop, D&L Machine and Fabrication Inc. of Hot Springs

"Hot Springs doesn’t have a barbershop. So I went to the Pioneer Bar," Theeler said last week.

As it happened, the bartender did double duty as a real estate agent. She explained that real estate was in the tank in Hot Springs because the community was off the beaten path, its economic mainstay as a health spa ended when its once prestigious bathing and soaking facility, Camas Hot Springs, closed almost 20 years before. Farming and ranching, also an economic mainstay, was only hobbling along.

No manufacturing or service industries had discovered Hot Springs and the town’s best efforts at economic rebirth had come to naught during the previous 10 years.

Theeler mentioned he was in the machine-fabrication business, and the lady barkeep said: "Well, there’s a machine shop down the street for sale."

Lewis Mountjoy, the community’s welder and machinist for some 50 years, had retired, and had put his big, drafty, machinery repair and welding shop on the market some time before.

Theeler got in touch immediately with Mountjoy, and soon enough, they struck a deal – after, of course, Theeler consulted with his wife Lisa, the "L" in the new company’s name. He told his employers in Oregon he was going to strike out on his own, and the owners decided to retire. So he bought many of the tools needed at auction in Oregon. When they arrived a few months later on three big semi-trailer trucks, it created quite a stir in the sleepy little town, Theeler recalled.

Theeler said he planned a peaceful semi-retirement in Hot Springs when he opened up his business early in 1997, serving local needs.

"We can watch the grass grow," he recalled promising his wife while planning their new life in Hot Springs.

In fact, he did operate a welding and machine shop for local farmers and loggers for a few months. But the grass didn’t grow very long before Theeler, now 57, was involved in other ventures.

"There was six months I did work for the locals. But my (old) customers found me. I bought a quarter-million dollars in machine tools, and started up," servicing many of the same accounts he had in Oregon.

He now does about $500,000 a year in gross sales, small compared to the $5 million a year in sales of the Oregon machinery fabricator. But it is not bad for what started out to be a welding shop in Hot Springs operated by a semi-retired mechanical engineer.

Soon, the Sanders County road maintenance department’s supervisor, Mark Lorcas, told Theeler about the county’s need for a modest-sized gravel screen that could be fed by one person, to screen gravel to spread on the county’s 300-mile network of gravel roads.

Rather than cobble together just another heavy-duty screen welded to a steel frame, called a "static rock scalper" in the trade, Theeler decided to design and build a better scalper from scratch.

"I attacked it from an engineering point of view," he said in a trade journal report. "People previously had built screens in just one size."

But in the gravel business, one size doesn’t fit all. Gravel is needed in a variety of sizes for road maintenance and construction.

"I knew there was a need for an infinitely adjustable product, so I created the Grizzly." It can be adjusted in 1-inch increments to screen almost any size of rock or gravel.

Success was not immediate. The prototype he built for the county literally fell apart as it was being hauled to the job site.

So Theeler went back to the drawing board. He beefed up the design, keeping the same concept – a portable, low-maintenance device easily operated by just one person, and that could screen gravel in any number of sizes. It allows the loader operator to clean the grates just by shaking the machinery with a front-end loader.

His new machine held together, and in fact worked very well, and very economically, just like he’d promised. The county accepted delivery.

"It’s worked real good for us," said Sanders County Commissioner Gail Patton of Lone Pine. "We needed a one-man operation that could screen all size of rocks."

Theeler patented the machine, and it is now sold internationally, as well as being widely imitated by other manufacturers.

Meanwhile, former customers who own the huge earth-moving loaders used to scoop up coal in open-pit coal mines were calling him, wondering if he could rebuild the 5,000-pound wheel rims used by loaders. Professionally rebuilt wheel rims cost about one-third what a new wheel costs, but few machine shops in the country have the necessary equipment to tackle such a job.

Theeler obtained the necessary machinery, hired some more welders and machinists, and pretty soon he was doing that work, too.

Theeler’s contacts in the industry, and his 40 years of experience, enabled his shop to become the only factory-authorized and repair facility for the Torgerson line of horizontal impactors and related heavy equipment. And the shop is now an authorized dealer for Gator Machinery Co., which designs and sells quarry and mining equipment internationally.

This puts Hot Springs center stage in a new global economic system.

The steel stock is manufactured in China, the designs and sales are made by Gator in Fontana, Calif., and fabrication and welding to Gator’s specifications occur in Hot Springs at D&L Machinery. The finished products are shipped from the shop by truck from Hot Springs.

D&L now employs 10 welders and machinists, and is looking for more, including entry-level welders. He recently contacted Kicking Horse Job Corps in Ronan to see if they had some interested candidates, Theeler said.

Others have been trained on the job. His shop foreman, Randy Giese, a retired Navy welder certified for nuclear welding, like Theeler, retired in Hot Springs planning to build and open a little roadside restaurant. Which he did.

But Hot Springs is a small town, where everybody soon knows everybody else, and soon enough Theeler prevailed upon Giese to come to work at the machine shop, supervising the production while Theeler concentrated on consulting and marketing.

D&L now has the capacity to do almost any job that can be hauled away by a semi.

The proof is on display just outside the shop, on a huge wheeled carrier made from steel beams. The 55-foot-long, 101,000-pound behemoth that the shop has manufactured is called a "closed circuit" crusher. It took two months to build (it was built in place outdoors, since it was too big for the 5,200-square-foot shop), and it will be shipped to El Salvador by truck and boat in the next week or so.

It can mince up 200 tons of boulders into crushed rock in about an hour, sorting it to the preferred size, Theeler said.

Theeler’s talents for getting things done on time and within budget did not go unnoticed in Hot Springs. Soon he found himself serving on the community’s Planning Commission, and he is now chairman of the Sanders County Airport Advisory Commission. Not coincidentally, he owns and flies his own twin-engine Cessna.

Theeler is also chairman of the Hot Springs Rodeo Association, and was instrumental in getting a new and much-improved rodeo grounds built a few years back.

He and his wife have four horses on property near town, and the tiny runway at the Hot Springs airport has been lengthened 1,000 feet or so to accommodate his Cessna.

His wife, a licensed U.S. Customs broker in her previous life in Portland, loves the area, and keeps the books for the shop, Theeler said.

He has bought virtually all available property east of the shop – six lots in all – and is planning on expanding his shop in the future, so workers can fabricate even the really big jobs, like those 50-ton rock crushers, under cover all winter long. That way he could produce four or five of them a year.

"I cannot say enough good things about Sanders County," Theeler said.

Reporter John Stromnes can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at [email protected]

http://missoulian.com/articles/2003/08/10/news/mtregional/news07.txt

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