Summary:
In this episode of Unfiltered Flow, Meghann Cook interviews Casey Ruttan, who shares his journey in the fluid power and automation industries. Casey discusses his role in a repair shop, his experiences with hydraulic systems, and the importance of safety training. He highlights innovative projects he’s worked on, the impact of smart technology and IoT, and the challenges facing the industry, particularly the impending knowledge gap due to retirements. Casey emphasizes the need for a deeper understanding of fundamental concepts in fluid power and the importance of preserving industry knowledge for future generations.
Takeaways:
Casey Ruttan runs a repair shop and offers consultative services.
HydraulicSchematic.com helps modernize old schematics.
Understanding fluid power systems is crucial for troubleshooting.
Safety training in fluid power is often neglected.
Innovative projects can lead to significant industry changes.
Smart technology and IoT are transforming fluid power.
A knowledge gap is looming due to retirements in the industry.
Basic principles of pressure and flow are essential for success.
Effective troubleshooting requires asking the right questions.
Preserving industry knowledge is vital for future evolution.
Transcription:
Meghann Cook (00:01.395)
Hi everyone. Welcome to Unfiltered Flow ELSC, the podcast dedicated to the progression of the fluid power and automation industries. I’m Meghann Cook and today it’s my pleasure to welcome Casey Ruttan to the show. Welcome Casey.
Casey Ruttan (00:17.422)
Thank you. Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Meghann Cook (00:20.499)
So for our viewers, I’ve been following Casey on LinkedIn. He does all kinds of cool things with rebuilds, repairs, and schematics involved therein. So Casey, why don’t you tell us what you do?
Casey Ruttan (00:38.958)
Sure, sure. Well, I mainly run the business side of a repair shop in Jacksonville here. And what that really entails is I take care of all of the billing and all those business transaction type things. But I also, having a fluid power background, I field all the calls. I answer all the questions that are in the…
you know, how much will this cost and how long will it take kind of kind of thing. I have I had my own shop in the past, so I just apply those same experiences that I had before to this to this shop here. And and it’s great because the the owner who is an extremely good tech technician has he rebuilds pumps, cylinders, you know, basically all things fluid power.
and he’s seen a little bit of everything. But where he was looking for assistance was on the technical side of things or on the computers, internet, looking up pump specs and things like this nowadays. And so we complement each other perfectly. And so I kind of run that side of the company for him and
and then I’ll handle any kind of consultative type calls as well. We get a lot of that. And he wasn’t really offering that kind of work before that kind of help before. And so I was able to offer that as well is a little bit of phone troubleshooting, kind of like a bit of analysis of symptoms of what they’re saying is going on with their system. There’s a real lack of
understanding of fluid power systems out there. so it’s incumbent on us as the experts to ask the right questions and look for the answers or look for them to reveal the symptoms to us so that we can help to better advise them, right?
Casey Ruttan (02:51.533)
Like if somebody calls you up and says, you know, they’re explaining that they’re having trouble with a cylinder actuating or something like this, well, we don’t necessarily just say get the pump out of there because it could be something else, right? It could be a sticky valve. It could be a who knows. So that’s worked out well. I get to do that. And while I’ve been doing that,
Meghann Cook (03:05.855)
Okay. Great.
Casey Ruttan (03:18.985)
I also started HydraulicSchematic.com, which is a service dedicated to producing schematics from whatever it is that you have. So if you have an old folded up, covered in oil piece of paper that is on the third shelf over from the fourth locker,
in the back of the store room behind all the used tires. You know what I mean? If you have a schematic like that, I can, what I try to do is take that and bring it up to today and provide you back with a PDF, something that’s printable, something that you can laminate, something you can blow up, know, things like that. And I started that in…
Meghann Cook (03:49.855)
Thank
Hey
Casey Ruttan (04:14.965)
May this year, I think it is. And at the same time, I started to explore and post a lot more on LinkedIn. And it’s been fun. I’ve taught fluid power in the past. And so it’s fun for me to write articles and make things kind of instructional, try to make it entertaining, but clear as well.
I find that there’s a need for more instructional type and clear instructional type teaching in fluid power. so I’m trying to fill what I think could be a need out there. And I’m having a blast.
Meghann Cook (05:03.519)
Yeah, listen, like I said, I’ve been following you for a minute and I love your posts and you did a laid out and layman’s terms. It’s beautiful. Yeah, yeah, love it. How’d you get started in fluid power, Casey?
Casey Ruttan (05:13.089)
Thank you. Thank you. Well, I really appreciate that.
Casey Ruttan (05:19.885)
Well, I was working in information technology in a tech support type role and then I moved into management and I did that for about six years or so and all of that work went overseas and the only work that was left here in the same company
It was a tech support call center that I worked at, but again, in a technical role.
that those jobs disappeared and it just became a regular call center. And so I lost interest and decided that it was time to work with my hands. I grew up with race cars and, you know, rebuilding engines and like doing stuff like that as it was and had a knack for it and really enjoyed it and decided that it was time to do that. So I did a one year program at the college where I grew up
in Belleville, Ontario, Canada, Loyola’s College of Applied Arts. And I just ran with it. I had a blast, met some great classmates and some great people that I still am in touch with today and ended up teaching there later on.
and started right after that at a local shop that half of it sold components and the other half did on-site service and troubleshooting and repairs and things like this. So I was there for a total of about six years and spent time in both companies, ended up owning half of the service side of it for a couple of years before I moved on and just had a blast. Then I took a…
Casey Ruttan (07:15.185)
Then I took a break from actually spinning wrenches and doing components to doing safety training, which was really fun. Hydraulic safety awareness training.
that really hadn’t been done too much in this industry before. And a former competitor of mine launched the Hydraulic Safety Authority of Canada. And I was with him for about two years. We had a blast getting that company off the ground and getting the training out there and gaining awareness in the market and in the industry of these concepts. That’s another thing that is somewhat overlooked in the fluid power industry is the safety side of things.
You know things like protecting hoses, making sure that loads are held in situations where we might have a hose burst or something like this. The lack of regulation in North America is
is interesting. It’s always kind of been something that puzzled me and I’m not big on more government rules. But so there’s but but there’s it’s kind of cowboy right now and in the fluid power industry and it always has been. So we tend to build systems, you know, by the lowest bidder and and they tend to be a little a little less safe or a little.
I guess less, they could be more safe than they are, I suppose, without going too far down that rabbit hole.
Meghann Cook (08:52.671)
Well you’ve done some of that overseas too, right?
Casey Ruttan (08:56.119)
Well, I went to the Cayman Islands for a couple of weeks when I was teaching for Hydraulic Safety Authority of Canada and did an entire week of training and then a week of consulting type stuff where we went around their sites and we looked at their equipment, we looked at their gear and made some recommendations, a lot of recommendations actually on ways to improve replacing hoses,
general maintenance kind of things that that that if you if you didn’t Really truly understand, you know what 3,000 psi of oil, you know screaming through a 3 8th means then
you’re not really gonna think too much about it. But then when you do start to gain this awareness, it can light a lot of people up. So I really enjoyed that. I had a blast the second week that like I say, I went around with the techs and some of the management who didn’t love all of the recommendations that I made because it cost them. It was gonna be hard.
Meghann Cook (10:04.305)
I’m sure not. All they see is dollar signs.
Casey Ruttan (10:07.861)
Yeah, and which I also understand. I understand the business side of these things. And we can’t just inflate the cost of machines and things like this. we do need to protect our people. so I tend to err on the side of people. that’s not always the case.
Casey Ruttan (10:38.348)
Yeah.
Meghann Cook (10:39.881)
Well, so in the time you’ve spent, what do you consider your most fun or important project that you’ve worked on?
Casey Ruttan (10:52.961)
Hmm. Did a few fun ones. I guess the funnest one was back in Belleville, Ontario. Actually, the facility was in Trenton, Ontario. It was a production facility that they had a room full of poppers that made mini rice cakes.
At the time, rice cakes were a thing, but mini rice cakes weren’t really a thing. They had one other production facility that they also, and this particular room in this facility was idle. They couldn’t get these poppers to work right. They’re all hydraulic, and they just couldn’t get them to work right.
Meghann Cook (11:25.823)
Thank
Casey Ruttan (11:46.926)
this other facility that had the same machines, I believe it was in Mexico, was doing okay, but still not doing great with these hydraulic popping machines. So they let me go in there. There were like 40 or 50 of them. And so I got in there one time and they were all idle and I got looking at them and…
and I just kind of threw it at the maintenance manager, why don’t you let me play with these? And so he did.
I went through each one of them. I used to rebuild the cylinders for them when they were trying to make the, when they were trying to get it work and then to get it to work. And then the cylinder business kind of dried up. But so anyway, I rebuilt the cylinders on a few of them. I, you know, I calculated the force that it was that they were that they were exerting. And I and I looked at the temperatures that they were used like, like they had a heating plate in them. And they would shoot the rice into this little this little this little pad and
And then a top platen comes down, super heats it, cooks it in like three seconds or something like this. And then it lifts up and another cylinder pushes a plate out and it knocks the rice cakes off and it goes down to a conveyor and off it goes.
Meghann Cook (13:00.831)
Yeah.
Casey Ruttan (13:15.603)
And so anyway, I got them working. It was the coolest thing. And the next thing you know, mini rice cakes were like a thing. I mean, I don’t know if I get to take credit for mini rice cakes. Right. But hey, I guess I had a hand in it. And that was a super fun project.
Meghann Cook (13:25.407)
They’re all over the place.
Meghann Cook (13:34.045)
for many a race.
Meghann Cook (13:40.542)
Yeah.
Meghann Cook (13:44.401)
Yeah, that’s cool.
Casey Ruttan (13:45.858)
Mainly because I really needed to get into some math and some calculations and some timings and temperature considerations, all this kind of stuff. I had replaced all the seals in it with fluorocarbon, Vitan seals, all those things that we do that people that aren’t in the fluid power industry don’t really know about.
So yeah, it was a blast. And I would say I did one other cool project that there was somewhere around like 05, 06 maybe, there was a really bad ice storm in the Midwest. Anyway, there were hundreds of thousands or millions of people without power in Missouri.
and an engineering firm that I did some work for in kind of a very quick fashion needed me to travel to this coal-fired electric generation facility and replace a counterbalance valve on their coal stacker reclaimer. It was an 85-ton coal stacker reclaimer.
It was a bit of an interesting, it was incredibly interesting and scary because, I guess I was trying to downplay it a bit, but it was really quite scary because the stacker, the boom had a bolster, a parking bolster for it, kind of shaped like the uprights for the football goal.
and you would bring the boom down into the bolster and then clamp it somehow, lock it in position, and then you’d be able to do maintenance on the fluid power system. So the bolster had been hit and was damaged and didn’t work. So the engineering firm came up with
Meghann Cook (15:59.431)
Casey Ruttan (16:07.549)
this idea that we could preload, we could just load the boom with coal, load the belt with the coal and it would hold itself down.
Casey Ruttan (16:21.709)
So, I remember sitting with the engineer planning this job and I was like, you know, I gave him the side eye, right? Like, so this has got an 85 ton counterweight on it and we’re gonna load it full of coal and then I’m gonna have them lower it to the bottom and I’m gonna take this counterbalance valve out of the…
Meghann Cook (16:33.371)
Okay, yeah.
Casey Ruttan (16:50.701)
you know, that’s on the blind side of the cylinder. This is a three foot, like 36 inch, or like it was a huge cylinder. 36 inch bore with like a 24 inch rod with a, I don’t even know, it was incredible. was like a 15 or 20 foot stroke or something like this. It’s a big cylinder. It’s not something that you play with every day. So.
Meghann Cook (17:12.319)
Mm-hmm.
Casey Ruttan (17:19.405)
Anyway, I really didn’t, I was young, know, was trying to keep this customer happy and I wanted to impress this guy and yes, yes, I was super keen on safety always, I always have been. know, like my dad used to, my dad drove an eight second super comp.
Meghann Cook (17:31.569)
Obviously before your safety days.
Casey Ruttan (17:47.244)
Dragster at a hundred that did 160 miles an hour and and so, know It wasn’t dumb for us like to wear a helmet or you know what I mean? like we was always big on safety growing up and played hockey and so, you know wear a mask and a helmet and all that kind of stuff and and so so this This situation I was concerned about but but I I put it aside
Meghann Cook (17:56.116)
Right.
Meghann Cook (18:01.914)
you
Casey Ruttan (18:15.411)
Again, you know, for business and for a potential long term, continued long term relationship with this client. So anyway, I went down there and what should have taken 20 minutes ended up being I was there for 18 and a half hours straight and finally got it changed. I cracked it, the boom went up.
boom raised and I was laying on the cylinder. It went all the way to the top. I tightened it back up right away but in cracking it I broke the o-ring and so we powered it back down but it wouldn’t stay.
It just kept rising as soon as they let go of the… as soon as they put the valve in center position, it wouldn’t hold. So we ended up having to power it down onto the top of… as close as we could to the top of the loading bucket of their largest Caterpillar front end loader they had.
which was the largest at the time was the the largest or second largest front end loader that Caterpillar made. We basically strapped it to that. It held it like we put, I don’t know, 100, you know, 100 huge straps on it. It big straps. This was also a union operation. So so it took 20 minutes to get in there.
Meghann Cook (19:51.518)
Well.
Casey Ruttan (19:59.662)
to the pit where all the coal was and the stacker was. And I’d be there for 20 to 30 minutes and a break would come up or the end of a shift or this or something would happen. And so it was a really…
It was a that was that that was also a very interesting job. We ended up we got it. I I you know, we got it. I got it out. There was there was no pressure on it. You know, I put the new counterbalance in. We had ingested some air, so there was some bounce in the cylinder. They had to you know, they had to cycle it a bunch of times over the next couple of days. I, you know, after 18 hours, I went back to the hotel, slept for three or four hours or something like that. Got up, got back in the car, went back to the site and, you know, stood
in the…
stood in the operators or wherever it was, watched it cycle five or six more times and just said, you know what guys keep doing that. You don’t need to be paying me, you know, whatever it was. By then it was, think straight time and a half because of the amount of time that I’ve, you know, that I’ve been there already or whatever. There’s no need to keep paying that for me to watch you dissipate the air out of this thing. Anyway, they site
Meghann Cook (21:15.057)
in there.
Casey Ruttan (21:24.239)
a little bit bunch more times. It was fine. It worked out. But who knows, right? It could have been a lot worse. really could have been. Yeah, that’s probably the wildest one.
Meghann Cook (21:33.231)
Yeah, that’s wild. Well, so this is the good lead in to the next question. Smart technology and IoT. What are you seeing now, you know, that’s changed in the industry in that regard?
Casey Ruttan (21:40.225)
Sure.
Yeah.
Casey Ruttan (21:50.049)
Well, I,
Some of the most interesting things that I’m seeing is…
Before I got to fluid power, I mentioned I was in IT and I built some networks and stuff like that. And so I still understand computers and networking and protocols and that kind of stuff. But I forget most of what I ever learned about PLCs. But it all still is very interesting to me. And one of the cool things that I see are a lot of these sensors becoming more readily available.
They’re coming down in price and there’s some interesting opportunities happening with data there. And I think that we’re gonna see some interesting developments with sensors and data over the next short while. It’s really something that’s…
Meghann Cook (22:52.521)
Yeah.
Casey Ruttan (22:58.005)
either somebody’s working on or needs to be.
Meghann Cook (23:02.367)
Like how you worked your way into that.
Casey Ruttan (23:06.945)
Right, right. If there’s anyone out there that wants to talk about this, I’d like to talk about it.
Meghann Cook (23:10.911)
Call Casey. So with the time that you’ve spent in the industry Casey and you know the changes that have happened and the changes that are going on now obviously there’s there’s a lot going on and will be in the next five to ten years. What would you
say to somebody that is in the industry, either just getting started in the industry or has been in the industry for a minute, you know, what skills and, you know, what type of, you know, additional education should they look at, you know, to be ahead of the game in the next five to 10 years?
Casey Ruttan (24:04.877)
I think one of the areas that we are most deficient in at the moment is actually a basic understanding of pressure and flow. That I think is, although fundamental, are difficult concepts to grasp.
The information is dry. The teachings are difficult and boring and rather uninteresting. And there’s a few people out there that are working in this area right now and that are just doing incredible work. And then there’s some other.
services or educational content available that still is kind of dry and difficult. You have to be really interested to want to dive into it and break it down. And even then, I can only take it in chunks, getting the old textbooks out and like, yeah, okay, so what is that, right?
Meghann Cook (25:23.583)
It’s such a fluid power is such a tough thing to sit at a desk and
Meghann Cook (25:34.431)
Listen to somebody talk about it. You know PowerPoint presentations that sort of thing going through it It’s one of those things that you have to in order to retain it at least for me You have to get your hands on it. You have to mess around with it It’s just yeah, it’s really hard to digest all the information
Casey Ruttan (25:59.854)
Agreed. Yeah, you really have to spark several of the senses, right, to educate a human being.
Meghann Cook (26:01.425)
sitting in a chair watching a presentation.
Meghann Cook (26:13.757)
That’s a good way to put it, actually. Yes.
Casey Ruttan (26:15.265)
We write like, you know, we call it adult learning techniques, but it’s really the same for children too. You do need to read something to some degree. You need to see it to some degree, touch it, smell it, and all those things. That’s right. And then eventually, you know, we can really…
Meghann Cook (26:35.337)
Nothing better than the smell.
Casey Ruttan (26:42.903)
get to a mastery level of a concept when we teach it. That’s really the last way or the final step to me in the learning process is to then teach it. So, know what I…
That’s just what I try to do, right? Like with my customers and with any of my colleagues, like I get emails and messages on LinkedIn a lot too. I get the odd request for a post or for a, know, can you do an article on this particular concept or whatever? Yeah, it was this year last week for a, it was a regen circuit.
Meghann Cook (27:17.899)
Which is awesome though, right? When you first, was that the beginning of this week or last week? You said you had a request. Was that the pressure comp? was it? Regen circuit, yeah.
Casey Ruttan (27:32.91)
Yeah, and a fellow that’s about to do one of the certification exams and was asking me about Regen circuits. And I was like, oh yeah, Regen circuits, they’re kind of sneaky. I got the book out too. It’s not like, oh yeah, I just reach, but.
I, you know, Regen circuits are sneaky. And so I got the book out and I was like, yeah, yeah, I remember you sneaky, little sneaky little bugger trying to create energy where there isn’t any. Anyway, I did a fun post about that. And it’s just something I really enjoy doing, totally enjoy doing. And I would say just to, you know, spin back to that, to your question about what to focus on, you know, for someone, you know, again,
I would say that there’s a deep need for an understanding of, again, pressure and flow, know, the Bernoulli principle, Pascal, those basic principles, but then applying those super basic principles to the area of a circuit that you’re dealing with. Like, if you’re gonna work in the distribution game,
which is tough, right? There’s a lot of distributors out there selling a lot of great product. And part of the issue is that folks don’t know their stuff, but they also, we’re not always applying those basic principles.
because there’s a lack of understanding. So if we have a customer telling us this is wrong with the system and we just order them a widget.
Casey Ruttan (29:35.374)
and it doesn’t fix the issue or it does, but it’s only temporary because we didn’t really find out what was behind that. We didn’t understand and we didn’t use those principles to investigate. Then we’re really not doing service for anyone, including ourselves. So I think that if I was to give anyone advice at the moment,
Get to a level of understanding with pressure and flow that is clear and deep. And then break down what it is you’re hearing and solve it in a simple way. troubleshooting, effective troubleshooting techniques, for instance, that’s something I’ve…
Meghann Cook (30:31.487)
ask a lot of questions.
Casey Ruttan (30:33.269)
Yeah, ask questions. Try to, you know, it’s sort of, know, playing doctor with a fluid circulation system, right? There’s similarities to the way that the body works, the way the blood flows and all this, you know, those principles of energy and flow and pressure are the same anywhere you put them.
Meghann Cook (31:02.143)
again.
What do you think the biggest challenge is right now in the fluid power industry, Casey?
Casey Ruttan (31:10.123)
Well, it’s in a really interesting flux. We’re about to have a serious vacuum, right? As we all know, over the next five to 10 years, we’re going to see a lot of retirement. We’re going to see a big drain on the knowledge base. And part of the issue is that locked in that knowledge base are
all the settings for the test bench and all of the crossovers of this valve to that valve or this filter to that filter. What does the S mean in the part number of a cylinder? All of that knowledge is hidden in the bank of
knowledge that is about to retire over the next five to 10 years. And so we need some CEOs and some folks that run these companies to just start planning a little better about succession. And let’s get this stuff, let’s get all this stuff documented so that we can so that we can curate it.
and efficiently pass it on to the next generation because we’ve got to get ready to build the next revolution of machines, whatever it’s going to be. We have AI doing all these things and there’s threats of humans losing jobs and all this kind of stuff. There’s a lot of things going on.
You can’t ever replace a human’s creativity and human ingenuity. so we need to preserve this knowledge so that we don’t devolve. We need to continue to evolve. so let’s get this stuff.
Casey Ruttan (33:33.853)
in let’s get this stuff down. Let’s get some databases built. Let’s get some some some you know some let’s get this knowledge backed up so that so that we can so that we can tap on it.
Meghann Cook (33:46.399)
Yeah, very good, you’re 100 % right there, Casey, for sure.
Casey Ruttan (33:51.863)
Well, I just want an opportunity to do it and have a chance to help. that’s my bigger picture is to see if I help in some way. I’m standing up.
Meghann Cook (34:16.009)
And you are, like I said, I’m so glad you joined today, because I love your posts and I love what you’re doing. It’s awesome.
Casey Ruttan (34:24.109)
Well, thank you. It’s a pleasure to chat with you and I’m available anytime.
Meghann Cook (34:30.963)
Thanks Casey, I appreciate you.
Casey Ruttan (34:33.463)
Okay.