“Every morning, I’ll make a point to start my day meeting up with Nigel [Plant Manager Nigel Davis] and doing a walk, just talking about some of the things that we might need to work on,” he says. “I find that’s something that’s really helpful, just to have that quick catch-up in the morning.”

On Thursdays, Loo comes in early to join the production team on their daily stretching exercises led by Production Manager Christian Apanay. “Part of it is to get the stretches. Part of it is to participate in Nigel’s daily huddle,” acknowledges Loo, who started at a co-op at Burnaby and returned after graduation. “We encourage a lot of face-to-face communication, especially when you’re doing this sort of custom design work, because you can show each other physical products or photos or models. And it gives you a lot more efficiency and effectiveness in being able to provide constructive criteria when you’re doing the design.”

Early in the COVID pandemic, the five-person engineering team was on site every day, working with the production team. “Part of that was because of the value that it brings to have that in-person interaction with each other,” says Loo. “We can do design work on the computer at home, but it only provides so much value, right?”

Clarity and organization are also essential because there is so much to keep track of. L.B. Foster Burnaby manufactures over 400 bracket designs and nearly 800 designs and configurations of applicators, plus the lubricants themselves. 

Since no two rail systems are the same, the engineering team and two lab chemists, including Formulations Leader Aryan Houshmand, work closely with customers and production to bring new products online that fit with clients’ specs. During a plant visit in August, the team met with representatives from Dehli Metro in India to develop a new formulation of solid-stick applicator.

“The chemistry group is always conducting R&D work to see how they can innovate and create new formulations,” using materials that are cheaper without sacrificing quality, longer-lasting, more effective at retaining magnetism or some combination of the three, says Loo.

On the hardware side, no two train systems are alike, so the brackets and applicators are bespoke depending on the customer.

Working with a train system in Australia required the Burnaby team to design entirely new rounded hardware to fit larger quantities of solid-stick lubricant for long journeys without maintenance. They are engineered using stronger steel to withstand extreme weather. “These are the big boys,” says Davis, holding up an applicator wheel. “Those trains are out of service for quite a while, out on the tracks. They need 800 millimeters worth of lubrication, and you can’t get that size applicator under the train. So we made a circular applicator, with eight sticks that interlock into there.”

The Burnaby team also develops products for a robust list of adjacent markets: torpedo cars that move molten metal in steel mills, roller coasters, port cranes, stadium roofs, industrial telescopes, trunnions (pivots on rotating drums). “Any sort of rotational steel-on-steel contact is where our product can help,” says Loo.

“The Burnaby engineering group, we’re a little bit unique in the sense that we act almost like a consulting body, instead of just pure engineering,” adds Loo. “We work closely with different potential customers looking for custom solutions for all types of products.”

To build a pump used to distribute grease, the team repurposed parts from an out-of-service hydraulic injection pump originally used to pump product into solid-stick applicators.

The team’s adaptability and creative thinking are helped by their past experience.  Two production workers originally from the Philippines have ship maintenance experience. Their mechanical knowledge translated well to production roles at Burnaby. “Most of our guys, we retrain them all internally,” Davis adds.

A native of Zimbabwe, Davis earned United Kingdom certification in four trades—metal fabricator, construction boiler maker, millwright and welder. There, he worked in a civil and structural engineering company, in machine maintenance for a tobacco processor and built machinery to process and blend sugar cane and gasoline into ethanol. He earned  recertification for his skills after he immigrated to Canada.

Recently, the plant’s general manager, John Cotter (who retired in June), challenged the team to make a low-cost lubrication stick for the freight industry. The results were a true cross-functional effort. Production worker Joemar Fortaleza suggested using coffee grinders to grind down leftover material from other solid-stick products. To try out the idea, Davis’s team procured a few used coffee grinders off Facebook Marketplace and milled the material back into powder form. They then developed trial batches of different ratios of reclaimed material and new lubricant in liquid form, casting them into molds to make prototypes to hand off to R&D.

After Houshmand conducted performance validation testing showing the recycled material met performance requirements, the lab took over development and commercialization. The first order produced from the coffee-grinder project was shipped in January and in the first four months netted more than $100,000 Canadian.

A fertile culture of innovation and collaboration at L.B. Foster Burnaby leads to outstanding results from a small but optimized workforce. Production workers are partners not just in making sure a quality product gets out the door safely and on time, but also in creating new products, finding new ways to reduce waste and recycle materials, engineering better processes and building custom equipment in-house.

“It’s quite fast-paced,” says Loo. “You might be working on multiple different projects with different customers at the same time. In addition to the custom nature of it, it makes things a lot less repetitive. There’s always new challenges, and I think that makes the work here a lot fresher.”