Andrew Parr, above, repairs and services the mobile heavy equipment at Hawaii Metal Recycling in Ewa. On Thursday, Parr examined the business end of a Caterpillar excavator in the company's scrap yard.
Heavy duty dude
Andrew Parr takes care
of the big stuff at Hawaii
Metal Recycling
Andrew ParrTitle: Maintenance superintendentJob: Oversees maintenance of the mobile heavy equipment fleet at Hawaii Metal Recycling Co.
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Question: What's your title?
Answer: I'm the maintenance superintendent (for Hawaii Metal Recycling Co.).
Q: I had heard that you work on heavy equipment.
A: Yes, I'm responsible for the routine maintenance and servicing of our mobile heavy equipment. I also take care of the record keeping and parts ordering.
Q: What kinds of heavy equipment machines are we talking about?
A: We're talking about Caterpillar excavators, Caterpillar loaders. I also have numerous forklifts, and a couple of track bulldozers. And I also take care of our trucking fleet, the maintenance and records for our truck fleet.
Q: How many trucks are there?
A: We're running five trucks on the road; three of them are tractor trailers and the other two are roll-off trucks.
Q: What's a roll-off truck?
A: We have approximately 90 roll-off container bins that we drop off at different construction sites -- or basically whoever calls for a bin -- and basically a customer loads it with their scrap metals and then our trucks go and pick it up and bring it back here for processing.
Q: Do you work with other mechanics?
A: I have several other people working with me, and on the bigger jobs I contract it out to Hawthorne Pacific, the local Cat dealer, or other various vendors.
Q: What's the main difference between being a mechanic for regular-sized vehicles and heavy equipment vehicles? Is it just that all the parts are larger?
A: Basically on the heavy equipment the parts are larger and heavier and we use a lot of specialized tools when we're removing specific parts. Our machines are mostly hydraulic operated, so we mostly work with hydraulic oils and hydraulic pumps.
Q: How did you learn your mechanic skills?
A: I started working with my brother-in-law (Harvey Roberts) as a mechanic's helper, passing tools. And from there I just kind of worked my way up.
Q: Where did he work?
A: He was working for his uncle, who had his own repair company.
Andrew Parr started with Hawaii Metal Recycling in 1994 as a laborer and now is in charge of maintaining the company's mobile heavy equipment fleet. On Thursday, Parr pointed to some of the raw scrap metal being prepared for recycling.
A: Not really. I'm mostly responsible for the mobile equipment. We have two Grove cranes that I'm responsible for, too.
Q: Besides mechanics, what other kinds of jobs do they have at Hawaii Metal Recycling?
A: We have shear operators, crane operators, loader operators, truck drivers; we run a pretty big operation.
Q: Is there a lot of noise on your job? If so, how do you protect yourself from it?
A: Yeah, there is. We're in a situation where there is a lot of noise. But we wear a lot of hearing protection and we have annual hearing checks.
Q: Oh, really?
A: Yeah, we have a really good safety program here; we try to stay on top of those kinds of things.
Q: Does your employer supply you with work clothes, or do you have to use, and wash, your own?
A: No actually we rent our uniforms through a company. So we have uniforms.
Q: Who sells your company all the scrap metal?
A: We get our scrap metal from various vendors, contractors, regular customers off the street. So basically we're open to the public as well as private contractors.
Q: Who buys all the scrap metal from you guys?
A: The last shipment we have is going to China. Prior to that is Malaysia. Basically what we do is we process it, we get it into the proper size, and we sort it according to the grade.
Q: Of the metal?
A: Yes, according to the type of metal it is.
Basically we have two different types. We have our shredded materials. That would be the automobiles, household appliances and light goods. And what we do with that material is we run it through our shredder, and that separates the different materials from it, like the upholstery.
And the other type of product we have is the heavy steel, which is basically mostly structural steel, from old buildings, which consists of items like rebars, I-beams. And that particular material we cut it to size and we export it that way.
Q: Are you close to the harbor?
A: We're about two miles away from Barber's Point Harbor.
Q: You deliver the stuff there?
A: What we do is maybe two, three times a year we'll charter a ship and bring it into the harbor and we'll transport our material to the ship and it's loaded onto the ship.
Q: By you guys?
A: The actual loading on the ship side is by the longshoremen. They have jurisdiction on the ship side.
Q: What's the best thing about your job?
A: To me what I like the most about the job is the challenge. Every day I come up with a new challenge, different tasks, opportunities.
We also do work on the outer islands. Like right now I have an excavator on Lanai, with a LaBounty attachment.
Q: And so you get to travel?
A: I do a lot of traveling to the neighbor islands.
Q: Sort of a bonus, eh?
A: Yeah, it is. We also have a machine over in Hilo, and we sometimes send our machines to Maui and Kauai. So we're actually on all the islands.
What we do is, we'll work with contractors on a demolition of a building -- like the sugar plantations. We worked with the contractors on taking down most of the plantations. So when we have machinery out there, I'm responsible for going out and making sure the machinery is running right.
Q: How long do you have to stay when you go outer island?
A: Usually I'll just go back and forth daily. Sometimes I'll stay overnight.
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