DFI

What do you like best about your job?

Definitely building custom equipment. DFI builds a lot of its fleet from scratch which is unusual for an outfit our size (about 180 employees). To work on a unit that was designed, fabricated, and assembled all under the same roof is a great thing to be part of. This is a family owned company, and I work directly with the owners every day. Because the team is fairly small, decisions can be made in minutes that would often take months in bigger operations.

What’s been your most interesting project so far?

DFI is best known for driving the steel piles under gas plants and other field facilities. Our most used piledriver in the past has used a gravity drop hammer to drive the pile into the ground. Our latest project has been a hydraulic piledriving hammer that outdrives a conventional hammer four to one. I can honestly say that these are the only self contained hydraulic hammer piledriving trucks in the world. We bring our own crane, loader, hammer, leads, and the beginning of the pipe load all in one picker truck–trailer unit. It takes only two men to set up and be driving piles within an hour of reaching site. Our goal was to create the best mobile, high performance piledriver for the oilfield. We’ve done it.

As shop foreman, what’s your role in creating a new machine?

When our engineers are working on a new project, the shop has a lot of input in the design. We can weld, cnc plasma cut, or machine almost everything we need onsite so changes are easy. The shop staff creates most of the hydraulics, controls, and programming right out on the shop floor. We have some very talented staff; my job is to get them whatever they need to succeed.

What else have you done at DFI?

In my nine years with the company, our most ambitious project had to be the pipe mill. It’s unusual for a company our size to make its own pipe, let alone scratch build its own ERW pipe mill. I helped put it together until the day we made the first piece of pipe—in fact, I wound up supervising the operation for a while. The mill produces 30,000 tons a year, and the pipe is shipped all over North America.

Give us the bottom line.

DFI runs a true custom shop and I’m proud to be a part of that.