(Taken from Truckstop World 1992)
Wesbrooks Inc. offers a one-of-a-kind service to the truckstop industry that saves operators thousands of dollars a year in shop tool replacement costs.
Begun as an experiment six years ago, the company now supplies rebuilt tools to over 700 truckstops across the country — everything from air impact tools to floor jacks and compressor pumps.
Petro Operations Manager David Latimer recalls how owner Bob Wesbrooks began the business:
“We [Petro] were having a high failure rate with impact wrenches. They retail for $500, but when they break, we usually threw them on a scrap pile. It wasn’t practical to get them fixed.”
Wesbrooks stopped in one day and offered to see what he could do with 12 of the scrapped tools. In a week he completely rebuilt 10 of them at about a third of the cost of a new unit.
The company was incorporated and began promoting tool exchange to other truckstops, and within a year 100 other truckstop shops were signed on for the service. Based in Wichita Falls, TX, Wesbrooks now boasts a full-time staff of 35 repair specialists, working under the supervision of David Bogart who has 35 years of experience in remanufacturing tools.
Turnaround time for exchanging tools can be as little as 48 hours. When a broken tools is received at Wesbrooks repair center, a refurbished mate is shipped by UPS the same day.
Recently, Bob Wesbrooks turned inventor, marketing an oil filter crusher of his own design. He has also added a couple of products: a “back saver” device that makes it easy to remove a truck tire from a wheel, and a torque gauge for checking the torque of lug nuts.