Jay Perrotta loves his job. Perrotta is engine distributor Mack Boring’s man in Maine, where he spends his days selling Scania engines to fishermen all over New England. “Fishermen are the best kind of people you could spend your time with,” says Perrotta. “I don’t have customers, I have friends.”
Another reason Perrotta loves his job is that he believes 100 percent in the product he’s selling and is excited to announce that it is about to get better. While New Jersey-based Mack Boring sells a number of different makes of engines, Scania 13- and 16-liter engines are what they recommend to lobstermen and other fishermen. “It’s the most efficient and long lasting engine on the market,” says Parraotta. “And the new 13-liter that’s coming is 10 percent more efficient. As far as diesel power is concerned, it’s as good as we can do.”
According to Perrotta, there are several things about Scania’s 13-liter and 16-liter engines that set them above the rest, among those is the quality of the parts.
"They squeeze everything they can out of these engines through engineering and the quality of the parts,” he says. “The key is to eliminate friction. The Scania parts are smooth due to their quality casting, so they can run at very fine tolerances. And with common rail injectors, you can inject fuel as many as five times during a single cylinder stroke, which means you can burn that fuel more efficiently because most of it is being injected when the cylinder is already hot.”
But what Perrotta believes counts is what the manufacturer is willing to warranty, and that detail is in the engine rating. “They give you the rating in the warranty, which is 2,000 hours or a year, and in that is a rating number. For Scania, it’s 1:6, which means you can run the engine wide open for one hour out of six. And you can run our engines at 70 percent load all day, from day one. We run and test our engines in the factory, so there’s no break-in period. You put the engine in and go."
Perrotta notes that an engine, no matter how good, is nothing without service, and for that, Mack Boring relies primarily on its dealers. "Tim Toppins is a good example,” says Perrotta. “He has a Scania engine in Downeast Maine with close to 30,000 hours on it and a few with over 20,000.”
"They’ll last if you take care of them and don’t over-wheel them,” says Toppins, who owns Toppins Diesel and Marine Services in Columbia Falls, Maine. “Some guys will put too big a wheel on and then run them at 2,300 RPMs. That’ll score the pistons.”
Toppins has installed over 200 Scania engines in Maine, and he makes service a priority. “Everybody’s got my cell, and they know they can call me whenever they need me,” he says. “I had a guy down on Cape Cod call me at 4 on a Sunday morning. He was having trouble with his control panel, but I was able to talk him through it and fix it over the phone.”
Besides stocking many of the most commonly needed parts, Toppins notes that he can get any necessary parts in 24 hours. “I just call the warehouse in Indiana,” he says. “And they can get it right out to me. I only got skunked once, they had to ship a part from China.”
Perrotta points out that Scania put its parts warehouse in Indiana on purpose. “It’s right next to a UPS hub,” he says. All the little things add up to customer satisfaction, Perrotta notes. “Maine is like Scania central in the USA,” he says. “And Tim is one of our best distributors, along with Billings, Midcoast, and Casco Bay."
