Maxey snow equipment wins Pole position

Carl Maxey’s waiting on a call from the South Pole.

Maxey, general manager of Fort Collins-based Maxey Manufacturing Co., has built a custom snow grooming machine that will be used to level and pack the South Pole airstrip used by the National Science Foundation’s polar research project.

The $35,000 implement – a prototype – will get its first test in late October, when the NSF crew sets up its seasonal field camp (summertime at the South Pole mirrors during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter months)

If the prototype works, the Maxey Manufacturing could be called on to build multiple units over the coming decade.

Maxey developed the unique groomer as a subcontractor for Raytheon Polar Services Co., the Denver-based unit of Raytheon Inc. that holds a long-term support contract with the NSF.

The challenge for Maxey was to produce a groomer of adequate size and strength, but light enough so parts could be reassembled by workers at the field camp without a forklift or other hydraulic equipment.

“There won’t be any machinery” when the groomer arrives at the field camp, Maxey said. “So, three guys have to be able to pick it up and put it together.”

Maxey Manufacturing’s engineer, Susan Reed, in collaboration with Raytheon’s staff, designed an implement that is 30 feet long and 12 feet wide, but weighs about 33 percent less than a standard groomer of that girth. It breaks down to be stored on two cargo pallets.

Upon arrival, the groomer – which will be pulled by a Snow Cat – will be put to work preparing a 10,000-foot-long, 250-foot-wide landing surface on the South Pole ice. The airstrip must be stable enough to support LC-130 transport planes, which have been modified to land on skis instead of wheels. The transports will carry up to 20,000 pounds of cargo.

Raytheon hopes the Maxey groomer can be more efficient than previous tools.

A better maintained runway means planes can weigh more, and field camp equipment can come in faster at the beginning of the research season.

“If we can bring the ACL (allowable cargo load) up quickly, we won’t have our first handful of flights flying at a low ACL,´ said Matthew Kippenhan, Raytheon Polar’s Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Project Manager. “Otherwise we lose tens of thousands of pounds of cargo.”

In addition to its lighter weight and detachable features, the Maxey groomer is wider than previous groomers, which spanned just eight feet, Kippenhan said.

The wider blade should “expedite” the grooming process. In previous years, the airstrip preparation took 24 hours before the first cargo plane could land.

“Now maybe the aircraft can come in the next day or later that same day,” Kippenhan said.

Snow business

Snow grooming equipment – Maxey makes groomers for snowmobile trails and ski hills – represents about 25 percent of the company’s sales.

For that, one must credit Loren Maxey’s sense of snow.

The company founder and Carl’s father recalls that Winter Park Ski Area was hunting in 1970 for an implement to push snow onto a troublesome spot on the mountain.

Winter Park’s mountain manager called on five different equipment manufacturers to design and build the product, and they all turned him down.

Apparently no one could see demand for more than a handful of such groomers.

With no more than 50 significant ski areas around the country, other manufacturers deemed it wasn’t worth the time.

The Winter Park manager, a Colorado State University graduate, had heard of a new farm equipment company in Fort Collins so called Loren Maxey, who launched his business the year before.

“I said if they would finance it, I would design it and guarantee it would work,” Loren Maxey said.

Eventually, the company ended up building 75 similar snow movers for the ski industry, which began to explode in the 1970s.

The Winter Park contract also put Maxey on the radar for other snow needs. A few years later a snowmobile club in Wisconsin asked Maxey develop a trail groomer. Now Maxey groomers are one of the standards in the industry.

Coming back

The Raytheon contract is part of a resurgence for Maxey Cos. that started in 2004 and continues this year.

In the post-9/11 economic downturn, Maxey saw its annual revenue dwindle from about $8 million in 2000 to as little as $5 million in 2003. The company was hampered by reduced demand and rocketing steel prices.

Many would-be customers put off acquisition of steel implements, thinking prices for the metal would come back down.

“Once people realized steel wasn’t coming down, that helped,” Carl Maxey said. Customers started coming back this spring, and sales have taken off, both in the snow-grooming sector and for the company’s vehicle trailers, which generates the majority of sales. The company expects revenue to rebound to about $7.5 million this year.

If Raytheon calls in October with good news from the South Pole, that figure could look even better.

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