CRAIK, Sask. – Curtis Heinen’s hands move deftly from lever to lever on the crankshaft grinder, a massive hunk of black steel full of moving belts, spurting coolant fluid and a whirring grinding stone.
He is starting to feel comfortable around the old clunker that he recently bought for $5,000 from a machine shop in Saskatoon. A new one would have run him closer to $60,000.
Getting a feel for a new tool is more important to Heinen than for most machinists because he has been blind since birth. Born prematurely, he was given too much oxygen in his incubator and lost his sight.
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He relies on his hands, his ears and his memory to navigate safely around the grinder, picking up a large wrench and loosening a belt on one side or using a key to adjust the chuck on the other.
Heinen appears to be at ease around the black behemoth, but that wasn’t the case when it first arrived at the shop.
“It was a new machine, different levers, everything sounds different. You’ve got to get used to it,” said the 27-year-old farmer-turned-machinist.
When the new lathe showed up he had a similar case of the jitters. He was reluctant to use it, preferring the comfort of the old machine that he knows so well. Eventually he decided it was silly to pay for a new piece of equipment and not use it.
Heinen has a lot of new machines to get used to. December was the grand opening of his business C & D Developments, a repair shop he operates on his parent’s farm, located 10 kilometres south of Craik, Sask.
He specializes in repairing blowers on grain vacuums, a trade he learned while working at Glen’s Grain Vac Service in Craik. Heinen bought the blower portion of the business last year when owner Glen Haugerud retired.
With the crankshaft grinder, a couple of lathes and a milling machine, the total price for his new business is around $75,000. A $5,000 grant from Saskatchewan Agriculture’s Farm Family Opportunities Initiative helped pay for some of the renovations to his shop.
Heinen charges $2,500 to repair a blower, which involves hard surfacing the veins on the muffler-shaped metal object.
Owning the business isn’t his childhood dream, but he gets a sense of satisfaction by taking a “dead machine” and making it work.
There are a few special tools that make his job easier. The most important is a pocket-sized voice box that plugs into various tools and gives Heinen verbal feedback.
He demonstrates how the machine works by hooking it up to a digital caliper and then measuring the shaft on a blower rotor. Heinen fingers his chest, activating the box in his pocket and a computerized voice responds, “Point four, three, nine, zero inches.”
The talking machine was created for mine workers who have to function in low light situations. It took a long time to find, but he eventually bought one through Acklands Grainger.
“That’s when I finally decided that maybe I could do this because I could find tools that worked. Before I had to get a sighted person to dial something in to make sure it was straight or to measure something.”
Heinen has also created a few tools of his own, such as a kill switch that magnetically attaches to the bed of his lathes, shutting the tool off once it reaches a predetermined distance from the chuck.
“I’m glad I came up with something like that. It helps me out quite a bit. That’s part of adapting.”
Adapting is something Heinen has done all his life. He credits his parents for putting him in a regular school system instead of sending him to a special school for the blind. And for putting him to work on their grain farm, helping out with most chores except driving the tractor.
“People used to get mad at them because they wouldn’t protect me too much. They let me go at ‘er.”
That approach instilled confidence in Heinen, who is now running his own business in addition to farming a quarter section of land and helping out with his dad’s operation.
He relies heavily on his ears, which pick up even the slightest of sounds like the farm cat entering the coffee room. The fat tabby is quickly identified as Bud once Heinen hears its distinctive meow.
The only thing he can’t do is weld. He hired his cousin to do that after realizing he couldn’t draw a straight line with the arc. Heinen tried using a jig but it would heat up and slide out of position.
Welding also requires gloves, which takes away that all-important sense of touch he uses for things like groping around a cupboard to pick out the dill pickle dip container containing metal shims.
His fingers have caressed every tool and piece of heavy machinery in the shop, resulting in hands caked with dirt and grease. But this is clearly a guy who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty.
