SAM Coverage
Maintenance
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Building for Efficiency
After Grand Targhee’s old maintenance shop collapsed, the resort planned for and built a new shop with all the fixins to help its crew…
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Caring for Your Snowcats
Proper preventative maintenance in the offseason will keep your grooming fleet purring. Ferraris. That’s what Peak Resorts founder Tim Boyd called our snowcats when…
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Maintenance Isn’t Automatic
Whether your snowmaking system is manual, automated, or a combination of the two, follow a careful plan of care to ensure maximum efficiency. SAM…
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A Lubricant For Every Use – Part 2 of a Two Part Series
Modern lubricants are extremely capable of doing their jobs, but only when you apply the right lubricant for the job. In part one of…
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Equipment Maintenance Part I :: Understanding Lubricants
Learning why certain lubricants are used for certain applications will help prevent your resort’s machinery from literally screeching to a halt. A hundred…
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Caring for Older Snowcats
Preventative maintenance can save your bacon–but it takes a commitment from the ground up. A snowcat is the most unique, impressive, and highest performing…
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Practical Metallurgy
It’s important that ski area mech techs have a solid understanding of the metals they’re using. Most of the time, we tend not to…
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Bolted Connections
The all-important nuts and bolts of nuts and bolts—and how to use them properly. There are bolted connections throughout a ski area,…
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Groom Safely
Here are 11 tips guaranteed to promote the health of man and machine. There’s a chill in the air, the leaves have fallen, and…
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Winterizing Summer Ops
The sometime downside to summer ops can be winterizing them. Contrary to the fantastical notion that the classic ’60s surf movie might want you…
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An Ounce of Prevention
Conveyor lifts have fast become the workhorses at mountain resorts. Servicing them before the season will prevent downtime and headaches. With more and more…
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The Modern Maintenance Shop
Efficiency is still Rule #1 for maintenance shops. Eight years ago I wrote an article on vehicle maintenance facilities for SAM that included design…
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Summer Maintenance Checklist
A little summer maintenance on winter equipment will go a long way in the fall. When the snow has melted and the lifts stop…
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Under Pressure
Special care is needed when dealing with hydraulic hoses on grooming vehicles. [Ed. Note: This is a reprint from SAM, September 1993. After 20…
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Cleaning Up
Sugar Bowl’s maintenance building is a model of cleanliness and efficiency thanks to an in-house competition. It’s always a struggle to keep our maintenance…
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Get Ready
Modern snowmaking equipment is only as good as the maintenance it receives. Here’s how to improve early-season performance. The winter of 2011-12 was a…
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What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate
With a little face time and dialogue (and a lot of beer) the vehicle maintenance guys can get along with the operators…really. “I don’t…
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Pay Now or Pay Later
Summer maintenance can save time and money and shrink the to-do list for opening next fall. Now that the ski season has ended, it’s…