FEATURE

That’s the part that remains the same: Nomad’s mission is still to deliver the technology their customers need, making sure it works where their customers do, which could now be anywhere from a baking hot desert to a minus-40-degree oilfield in winter.

To take a rig from concept to completion, the customer’s vision first goes to a team of mechanical, electrical, and information technology engineers who come up with a design based on the project’s needs and limitations. Considerations for the vehicle itself—clearance, four-wheel drive, width and height, to name a few—are just as important as the technology inside. If the client can’t reach their destination, all the fancy equipment in the world won’t do them any good. And there’s lots of fancy equipment.

“Do you want a mobile command center, a mobile dispatch center? Do you need secured or unsecured networks, do you need satellite, do you need cellular, or a combination of all three for redundancy?” says Jerritt Turner, the information technology engineering manager, explaining just a few of the many technical considerations that go into each vehicle.

Once the customer and the engineers agree on the specs, the physical work begins. The fabrication building now runs as much on technology as manpower, though that wasn’t always the case.

“When I first came to Nomad, we didn’t have anything,” Shigo says, remembering his early days 11 years ago when the company could make some pieces with “old-school shears” but outsourced most of their parts manufacturing, which created huge time delays, especially if a part needed tweaking.

Now two huge computer-operated laser cutters fill the front of the fabrication building. They’re fast and intricate and—most importantly—in-house. An engineer can design a part and hand the plan off to a technician to cut with the laser. If it’s not quite right, they can adjust it in a matter of minutes instead of days.

Just beyond the lasers, one technician bends metal vehicle parts to the correct angle with a computerized brake while another machines more intricate parts on a computerized mill, which is even programmed to switch bits—from grinding to drilling, for example—automatically as it progresses through the directions the technician programmed for it. And then there’s the welding robot.

Melissa Olson, one of Nomad’s experienced welders and the robot automation operator, says that the robot offers unique time-saving advantages in addition to its welding abilities.

“What’s really cool about it, there are places that the robot can’t reach, and I can literally weld right next to it,” she explains. “It’s not like welding next to a person where I have to be concerned about slag and which direction and whether I blind them or not. He doesn’t mind any of it. I can set him to weld on one part and I can weld on another, which doubles our efficiency on those parts.”
Shigo explains that, with the right attachments, the robot could be programmed to do anything from heavy manufacturing to delicate packaging. He’s even seen a video where their exact robot had been programmed to make espressos in a Japanese department store. More robots are in the company’s future, though probably not as coffee makers.

Once the parts are assembled to create the vehicle’s basic metal structure on the chassis, the guts go in. Wires, wires, and more wires. Wires that direct a vehicle’s self-leveling capabilities and boot up computers. Wires to extend a 40-foot mast when a Nomad-built T-Mobile truck pulls up in the wake of a tornado so the vehicle can broadcast a cellular signal across the disaster area.

Wires to make sure that when the Air Force is testing the F-35 stealth jet, their Nomad-built mobile engineering center can pull in the terabytes of information the plane broadcasts on its flight, allowing engineers to analyze the data in real time and quickly make alterations. Prior to the development of these incredibly high-tech vehicles, which are engineered to prevent electromagnetic interference (aka spying), the plane would land after a test flight and the data would be physically taken off the plane in hard drives. Those would be securely sent to a military engineering center, analyzed, the programming tweaked, and then the hard drives would make the return journey before the next flight. Changes that might take two weeks now take an hour. Coming advancements in li-fi, light-based data transmission, could cut the time down to a refueling stop.

“ There’s no doubt that success favors those who are willing to put in the work, as well as those who are unafraid to try.”