Good day to you all, this is Colin writing today. I don’t generally have a quiet time of year. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, is where CanTorque is based. Edmonton is known for a few things:
Our river valley, which is the largest municipal park in North America, has unmatched beauty, especially in the fall.
Our Energy Industry
As well as being home to 2 of the greatest hockey players in NHL history Connor McDavid and Wayne Gretzky:
Our winter season can last up to 7 months so we tend to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible when we can.
In the summer, business at CanTorque tends to slow down but I end up spending many evenings and weekends at various kart and car tracks across North America.
Of course, we are continually working on improving our tools. But there are many times where we’ll have gaps of a few weeks as designs are being verified by engineers or 3rd parties. During those periods I tend to work in and on the shop.
We’ve owned our building since 2003 and, over the years, have painted, replaced or repaired virtually everything here.
We needed to repair some of the light fixtures in the building and as I was organizing parts and pieces I spoke to an electrician friend of mine to ask where he recommended that we purchase ballasts.
“Why the hell would you want to replace ballasts? Just remove them and replace with LED bulbs”.
After a bit of back and forth on how to accomplish this I set out on acquiring this new technology.
Because we’re also getting ready to start our 25th year I’m spending a bit of time reminiscing about some of the major landmarks; this week was thinking about how much time and effort we put into cleaning up the building when we bought it. his what our back shop looked like the day that we started moving in
This is from 2012 as we drastically expanded our inventory
And now today after upgrading the shop lights to LED
But, I’m proud to say, that I did all of the removal and replacement myself with help from Parker:
Dealing with fixtures that are 20 years old is dirty work (and yes, I still get my hands dirty):
Each fixture that we were going to fix would have required a $40 ballast and $10-20 in bulbs depending on whether it was a 2 bulb or 4 bulb lamp. By eliminating the ballast we suddenly were $40 per lamp to the good.
Our future is definitely going to be bright!