November/December 1995
His company today might be almost unrecognizable as the business Bob Johnson started in front of his house 20 years ago, but his tough, simple E-Z crusher is much the same—with some modern additions—and Bob’s still a-tinkering away on new projects.
By Jeff Borsecnik
Jeff Borsecnik is associate editor of Scrap Processing and Recycling.
Growing up on a farm, Robert Johnson learned how things work, and making things work is what he's done steadily since. Among the achievements that tinkering has produced is his trademark E-Z Crusher car compactor, which he developed in his front driveway in tiny Fair Haven, Minn. And while this machine remains the cornerstone of his career and his company, R.M. Johnson Co. (Annandale, Minn.), he's made other ventures work as well.
"I like to see something happen," says Bob of his various business adventures, citing as an example a pair of hot-mix asphalt plants he helped establish. "I didn't want a hot mix plant," he says. "It was just fun to see them get up and running."
There are a number of projects and products, in fact, that Bob has overseen from concept through production. This might lead you to peg him as an engineer, but Bob is quick to point out that he has no formal training as such. And he considers this a certain advantage: "Not being a professional engineer, I can work on something and, all of a sudden, decide, 'That was a dumb idea' and cut it up in 3-foot lengths and put it in the scrap barrel. But the college-educated engineer might just say, 'I've got to make it work.' Sometimes it's better to say it was dumb and save yourself some money in the meantime."
Instead of engineering school, Bob's training cam on the job through early experience operating a lathe and driving a truck, then running a sand-and-gravel-washing operation and working in construction, and, eventually, manufacturing goose-neck trailers and other items on the side.
Those stints paved the way for the establishment of R. M. Johnson Co. and the E-Z Crusher. In 1972, Bob was approached by Floyd Nolan, proprietor of French Lake Auto Parts, an automobile salvage yard located near Bob's home. “Floyd bugged me to build him a crusher, So I said, 'Sure.”’ At the time, there were other car crushers on the market, but the two figured Bob could do the job at a fraction of the going rate. "So in the evening after 10—after my wife and kids were in bed—I did the designing and thinking. And I got money from Floyd to get the first batch of iron, brought it home, and built it—and it worked. Then another guy heard about it and said he wanted a crusher." The result: Crusher number two—a mobile design (like nearly every unit produced since)— was on order even before the first was completed.
The third E-Z Crusher sold shortly thereafter, at a stock car race in Fargo, N.D. (Bob is an avid automobile racer and fan, as are many auto salvage company operators, providing a natural business link.) Things were getting serious by the time the order for number four came in.
Bob & Co. Grows Up
The sales kept coming, despite the fact that for the early years of its existence, R.M. Johnson Co. relied exclusively on word-of-mouth advertising. "Our early customers were our biggest salesmen," says Bob. "They all wanted to do their friends a favor."
And it was probably a good thing the fledgling company wasn't too focused on marketing. With the help initially of only a single welder, Bob had his hands full. In fact, it took about three months to build a single crusher in those days. ("Now we get one done in four days!" he notes.)
A key to the E-Z Crusher's success was that, unlike others available at the time, it requires almost no setup, Bob explains. "You can go down the road, pull in, and in about two minutes you're ready to crush cars." It's an advantage afforded by what he says was innovative placement of the crusher's hydraulic cylinders: on the bottom deck of the unit, permanently in position to work; they don't have to be raised or pivoted.
This positioning also takes better advantage of the cylinders' strength than other designs, Bob says, explaining that since they pull downward rather than push, the rams encounter the greatest resistance when they are at their strongest point, nearly retracted.
With positive reviews of the E-Z Crusher continuing to spread, R.M. Johnson Co. was quickly outgrowing the new 90-by-30- foot shop Bob had built behind his home for the purpose. So in 1978, the company became the first tenant in a new industrial park in nearby Annandale , a small town about 50 miles northwest of Minneapolis .
Its newly expanded production capacity, combined with a larger work force, soon prompted the company to issue its first formal marketing effort: a postcard featuring a photo of a crusher. And in 1981, Bob's brother Ralph—who was seeking a career switch out of his own construction business, where stress-related health problems dogged him—came aboard as the firm's first formal sales staff.
Then came the slump of the early 1980s. "While the rest of the country was in recession, our business was in a depression," says Bob. "One year we built only three machines. But by golly, it all came around in the mid-‘80’s.” By then, he says, scrap prices had rebounded and a lot of old crushers were wearing out. “I knew things would be busy, and they were.”
There was a downside to the company’s maturation, Bob confesses. He was not happy managing the daily affairs of a stable, established firm. “I never did enjoy being a businessman,” he says. “I still don’t.” He’d rather be tinkering, building something. But some unfortunate circumstances in 1989 took care of that situation. A run-in with cancer temporarily sidelined Bob—and forced him to divvy up his responsibilities and let everybody run with them. "If an issue got too big, they could talk to Ralph," he notes, giving his brother much credit for the company's growth.
After recovering from surgery, Bob returned and realized some things were being done better than when he left—and he had the good sense to leave them that way. "I didn't take the responsibilities back," he says. "I could stand farther back and figure things out, see what we should be doing in the year ahead instead of the next week."
Banking on Tough and Simple
R.M. Johnson Co. now offers three car crusher models. The A model is the largest and heaviest, weighing around 63,000 pounds and offering 10-inch hydraulic cylinders. Model B, the predecessor of A, has 8-inch cylinders and weighs 48,000 pounds. And model C has 6-inch cylinders and weighs only 14,000 pounds.
Models A and B operate using a series of compression cycles. The first is a straightforward vertical compression in which the unit’s lowered “lid” stops about 20 inches above the platform to enable the operator to avoid crushing break drums and engine blocks that might release oils. (But just in case, the crushers are equipped with an oil-collection system.) Subsequent cycles combine straight compression with alternating action by the cylinders. This provides for particularly effective crushing, explains Ralph, because the force is multiplied along the length of the slanted lid like a lever, and the cylinder that holds while the other presses can actually exert more pressure than if it were moving.
After the first car is crushed, others are added to the package, with the maximum load size depending on how each car is stacked above the others. As Ralph explains it, the "soft" parts of bottom cars in the pile can be pressed to just 3 or 4 inches in thickness by the cars above them, and if the operator skillfully places cars on the deck so the "hard" components like engines don't stack vertically, the result can be particularly tight compression. In fact, he says, while a normal load of crushed cars might be about 25 tons on a 40-or 42-foot flatbed, some operators can achieve much more. "We've got a guy in Toledo whose small loads are 28 tons and whose big ones are 40," he cites as an example.
The model C, in contrast, presses cars one at a time in several bites as they are moved through it, a compromise for its much smaller size.
Besides cars, an E-Z Crusher's diet might include other large scrap, especially where the car supply is limited or other large scrap items must be moved to a distant market. "Anything a shredder can shred, an E-Z Crusher can package up and make a truckload," says Ralph. "I've seen them crush concrete mixers, hay balers, big combines, dump boxes off big trucks, and metal shipping boxes. One guy bought two to crush shipping racks made of 4-inch tubing standing up that's pretty heavy stuff!"
Even when pushed to these kinds of extremes, the E-Z Crusher requires no kid gloves, says Ralph. "They can stand a terrific amount of abuse. Some [customers] are real tough on them, and they take it pretty darn good," he says, delivering this prescription: "Keep it clean, greased, and serviced, and you can just work the daylights out of it."
Durability shows up in "fantastic" resale values, says Bob, pointing out that units that originally sold for $75,000 have been known to fetch $68,000 after five-plus years and 10,000 hours or so of duty.
The key to this level of durability, the Johnsons say, is the E-Z Crusher's simple, rugged design. "We don't want to build anything very complicated," says Bob. As a further testament to this simplicity, he notes that the crushers are designed to use readily available replacement parts. "We don't build in any parts that can come only from here. Like for the hydraulic system, you can buy the hoses, valves, and kits just about anywhere in the world. That way, if a customer 2,000 miles away has a problem, he can run out real quick and get the part and put it on the machine." Then again, Bob, who only seems to stay serious for so long, quickly adds, "Only one-tenth of 1 percent of our sales is parts, which is not normal. And actually it's not smart!"
Beyond the Crusher
The other major piece of processing equipment in the R.M. Johnson Co. line is the E-Z Log-Baler, which bales scrap into bundles dense enough for economical shipping but not too tough for an automobile shredder to digest. When the first unit was introduced in 1982, "I couldn't even give it away," jokes Bob. "I refer to that first one as a Studebaker—it got ahead of its time." More recently the machine has "come into its own," he says, noting that several dozen have sold in the last four years or so.
Bob attributes the initial lack of interest to suspicions on the part of some shredder operators. Unlike the E-Z model, he explains, most loggers are combination logger/balers, which means their output can be as dense as a standard bale—and one dense bale among loose logs could send a shredder down for expensive repair. R.M. Johnson, therefore, promotes the fact that its logger simply cannot produce such threatening bales.
The E-Z Log-Baler works using a compression sequence that essentially tangles or "rolls" scrap—borrowing the "rocking" principle the E-Z crusher employs in alternating use of its two cylinders—into a loose, interwoven log with a density of no more than 30 pounds per cubic foot. Rolling, rather than "smashing the daylights out of it" with straight compression, produces a log that is loose enough for a shredder to handle but sound enough to hold together even if dropped, according to Ralph.
Like the E-Z Crusher, the logger is basically ready to go as soon as it arrives on site, features a simple design with few moving parts, and it also relies on off-the-shelf components, the company says. The logger, in fact, uses many of the same hydraulic components as the E-Z Crusher.
Beyond this machine, R.M. Johnson Co. has developed several smaller products designed to complement the E-Z Crusher.
For instance, cars headed for crushing usually come with wheels, so the company offers a trailer-mounted rim crusher that compacts rims while popping the tires off. An optional attachment can then be used to cut the tires into segments, easing their storage and disposition. (Many landfills that don't accept whole tires reportedly accept those that have been quartered.)
The firm also produces a mobile tire baler, which turns a line of tires stacked on a rack along its horizontal axis into a dense, wire-bound bale. Though not a big sales item to date, the company expects the tire baler to have a bright future once tire recycling and/or incineration become more common.
Bob's drive to tinker in new areas has also moved out of the salvage-related area somewhat, resulting, for example, in several attachments for skid-steer (and some larger) loaders—a "cable plow" for burying cable, an alligator shear, and a concrete crusher. Because they serve a different market, these products have been farmed out to another manufacturer.
Though Bob has been in on the primary-pencil stage of all of these products, he shies away from the term "inventor." "Very few things are invented," he explains, suggesting instead the description "innovator—someone who can take things that have already been done and apply them" to solve a problem. As an example, he mentions the cable plow: "Actually, Ralph and I designed it on a place mat—that's where most of our work gets started, on a place mat in a restaurant. We designed a shaker made out of existing parts. It uses an orbital motor, something available but never used for that purpose. [The manufacturer had] built hydraulics all around world, but had never used it for that purpose. For us, it was self-lubricating, required no maintenance."
Rounding out R.M. Johnson Co. is a division that repairs railroad cars and fabricates specialized rail parts in nearby Kimball , Minn. "Another company was doing it and they closed their doors," Bob offers by way of explanation. "Don't ask me how I decided we could make it go when they couldn't—that's what I couldn't explain to a banker—but it's going well."
In addition, Bob and Ralph, along with the company's general manager, Jamie Miller, and shop foreman, Alan Theilen, also own another business, Crow River Industrial Coatings. The company, which is adjacent to but separate from R.M. Johnson Co., makes paint, some of which is used on R.M. Johnson products. The rest is sold for applications like farm machinery.
The paint and rail businesses provide new challenges and opportunities for R.M. Johnson Co.'s employees, says Bob, who is eager to hang on to the staff he has gathered. It also—he hopes—eases the harsh cyclical nature of the scrap business.
A Long Way From the Driveway
R.M. Johnson Co. has changed dramatically since its founding in Bob and Elaine Johnson's driveway. It's now a buzzing 80-plus-employee operation in six buildings, capable of fabricating almost all of the components it needs, including hydraulic cylinders, and custom-building and rebuilding crushers and other machines—its own and competitors'— to buyers' specs and budgets. It's also gotten leaner and more efficient over the years, says Bob: "We're putting out as many crushers now as in '88 or '89 with the same people, but we're also putting out all the tire stuff and loggers, and making and selling paint
Bob doesn't seem to have changed much, at least in his enthusiasm for trying new things. He still has his hand in new products, especially on the place mat end, and he's more comfortable atop a bulldozer— where he spent much of last year building the Kimball rail facility—than behind a desk.
His company today might be almost unrecognizable as the business Bob Johnson started in front of his house 20 years ago, but his tough, simple E-Z crusher is much the same—with some modern additions—and Bob’s still a-tinkering away on new projects.