The Radiator Man

There’s a small radiator shop on Main St. in San Angelo that is helping big oil field service companies innovate the way they care for their equipment. In particular, Concho Valley Radiator Service, 501 N. Main St., is showing large, multinational companies how to refurbish their radiators on the large semi-trailers that perform hydraulic fracturing. Owner Gregg Bowman estimates that refurbishing the radiators saves the companies 40 to 60 percent over purchasing new.

And the part is quite large. Two 12-by-12-foot white radiator units sit atop a typical frack trailer. New, Bowman estimates each unit costs almost $90,000. But Bowman’s shop can refurbish them to be like new for $25,000 to $45,000. In an oil industry hit with a low price-per-barrel in a price war with OPEC, that savings is a significant enhancement to an oil field service company’s efficiency.

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Above: Loading a frack truck radiator for delivery. (LIVE! Photo/Joe Hyde)

Companies must evolve to remain relevant, and few industries have evolved like the traditional radiator shops. When Gregg Bowman got into the business after a short stint in the military as an F-15 “Eagle” mechanic in the early 1980s, radiator shops repaired car, truck and light industrial vehicle radiators. Today, car radiators are throwaways, and it’s cheaper to replace the entire unit than repair them. To stay relevant, Bowman had to innovate.

Bowman is a quintessential steely-eyed west Texas man with a habit of tinkering and adjusting in light of new opportunities. After departing active duty as an enlisted mechanic at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, he said he’s always held more than one job. His main occupation after returning home to San Angelo was working as a U.S. Post Office mailman. He was also enlisted, and later a commissioned officer, in the Texas National Guard. (Bowman graduated from Officer Training School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1989 at the old age of 32. Everyone else in his class was fresh out of college and 22).

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Above: Cleaning the radiator screens is required before replacing tubing and other parts in the refurb process. (LIVE! Photo/Joe Hyde)

What attracted him to the radiator business was a desire to help people in addition to his mechanical skills and military mechanics training. He credits the U.S. Air Force with solidifying his discipline. They strip you down, hand you a bunch of responsibility and hold you to it, he explained. “All of those are little tools in your toolbox. Once you get the common sense to do mechanics it transcends a lot of lines,” Bowman explained.

There was a former radiator shop in the old Eggemeyer building on E. Concho Ave. where Bowman had worked in years past part-time. Later, Bowman learned that the owner wasn’t taking care of business when an employee there expressed to Bowman that he was afraid his paycheck would bounce. Bowman saw opportunity not necessarily for himself, but he thought he had the skills to turn the shop around so the young man there wouldn’t worry about cashing his paycheck.

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Texas Bank helped Bowman get a small business loan and the rest is history.

Almost.

The kid mechanic for whom Bowman found his motivation to buy the shop failed him. He’s locked up in the state prison system today, Bowman said. That left Bowman a business in an auto repair business that was rapidly evolving as automakers changed the way they built cars. Car radiators were worse than a commodity; they were disposable and cheap, built by low-wage workers in Mexico and perhaps China.

On a short stint working in the oil field, Bowman stumbled upon a radiator opportunity that would allow his small radiator shop to thrive throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The pump jacks all over west Texas have small, specialized radiators attached to their motors and not many companies in the region were servicing them. Bowman plowed into the pump jack radiator business, which is still a mainstay of Concho Radiator today. He has parts custom-fabricated and has built a system around keeping pump jack engines cooled. The pump jack business led Bowman to the need for radiator service on the large frack trucks. Today, his customer base is all over the country, from North Dakota to Oklahoma, and the oil fields of west and south Texas.

Bowman still believes that his company is about his five fulltime employees, not him. He pays all of them well and covers 75 percent of their employee health insurance costs. “I decided a long time ago that it wasn’t about me. This is our workplace,” he said.