The lost art of elevator maintenance.

What happened to maintenance

For decades, route sizes across the elevator industry grew until maintenance time all but disappeared. A technician running hundreds of units has time to answer breakdowns, and not much else. A generation of mechanics came up without anyone teaching them what thorough preventive maintenance actually involves, because there was never time to do it.

Independent companies have been improving this, with smaller routes and higher standards, and the industry is better for it. But giving a mechanic time is only half the fix. Someone still has to teach the craft. What to tear down, what to measure, what to adjust, and what the equipment is telling you before it fails.

That is what we train for, and that is the standard we hold. Reminding the industry what it can still be capable of.

What our standard looks like

• Brakes torn down and rebuilt. We measure wear against specification and replace parts before they fail.
• Door operators gone through end to end. Doors cause more service calls than any other system in the machine, so that's where the hours go.
• Adjustments measured. There's a real difference between an elevator that runs and one that runs right, and it shows up in the numbers.
• Every visit documented in plain language, so the owner can read it and know what happened.

Little of this photographs well, which is part of why it stopped getting done.

What independent means here

An independent service company isn't tied to any single equipment manufacturer. Our recommendations follow the equipment's condition, because there's no product line to defend. Communication is direct, because the person answering is close to the work. And we earn the relationship every year, because an independent can't coast on having its name cast into the machine.

Leadership

John Nyquist

CEO, Head of Elevator Operations

John has spent more than twenty years in the elevator industry, working markets in Texas, Florida, and Nevada. He previously worked for major OEMs, and most recently served as Senior Vice President at a large Texas independent, where he led the company's expansion into new markets.

At Thunderbird he's responsible for every facet of operations. The approach comes from the systems he built along the way, KPI accountability on every route, field dashboards technicians actually use, route designs that leave time for real maintenance, and he hires from a network of field talent built over those twenty years.