Dakota Supply Group - Index

Dakota Supply Group - dakotasupplygroup - Index

Bringing Heat
MAC, Inc. is one of those classic Midwestern
success stories, complete with adversity,
ingenuity and determination. Fortunately for
DSG, it’s also a story about a great customer that
needed help with control panels. The timing
could not have been better, and consequently,
MAC, Inc. was one of the first companies to take
advantage of DSG’s Sioux Falls panel shop.
The results have been a success, and sales for
MAC, Inc. are really heating up.
In the late 1970s, Paul Christianson did what
everybody did in rural Glenburn, North Dakota.
He farmed. It was great when crop prices were
up, but bad when they sagged in the early 1980s.
Preparing for the worst, Christianson, along with
partner Jim McDonald, decided to try their
hands at manufacturing. Gifted mechanics,
their idea was to build a better grain dryer. The
product never took off, but Christianson looked
for other ways to use what he had learned with
his grain dryer experiments. He saw an
opportunity in the only other industry that
shared the farmland around Glenburn – oil.
Christianson had seen products that were used
to heat the facilities and equipment used to drill
oil, and he had a hunch that his grain dryer
technology would be a perfect fit. He created a
portable heating unit that would run on either
diesel or gas (natural or propane). Best of all,
his heaters used a heat
exchanger to create warm
air that was clean, unlike
many industrial heaters
that suffered from issues
with exhaust. Paul and his
partner, Jim McDonald,
formed MAC, Inc. in 1983
and started making units
that could be moved to
virtually any site that the oil
company needed to heat.
These Chinook heaters, as
they came to be known,
were powerful, maintenance-free
and incredibly
durable, an important
factor considering the
desolate and sometimes extreme conditions
under which they were used.
If the lagging farm economy had been strike
one, strike two for Paul Christianson occurred
when the oil boom in North Dakota came to an
abrupt stop in the 1980s. For a company that
depended almost solely on the oil industry, the
timing could not have been worse. This story is a
lot like baseball, however, in that there are three
strikes before you are out – and thanks to a bit of
perseverance, the next pitch yielded a home run.
Virtually all of the staff that the nation’s major
oil companies had once kept in North Dakota
left for the oil-rich lands of Alaska’s North Slope.
Christianson stayed in touch with them, and if
there is anywhere on earth that the equipment
and personnel working with an oil rig require a
rugged heater, it’s Alaska. The connection paid
off, and soon MAC, Inc. was sending Chinook
heaters to Alaska on a regular basis. Word of
mouth spread, and stories about the Chinook’s
amazing durability and inexpensive operation
began to work for MAC, Inc. Business took off.
Today, MAC, Inc. employs more than 20
people and has expanded its facility outside of
Glenburn four times over the years. It sends
Chinook heaters all over the world.
Eric Christianson shows off one of DSG’s custom control panels.
Continued on page 4
AUTOMATION
Spring 2008 CONNECTIONS
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