Boom truck trailblazer Ray Pitman Snr has merged his company Pioneer Engineering into long-term manufacturing partner Mega Manufacturing of Hutchinson, Kansas, which is aiming for a 25% market share of the US boom truck market on the back of the voluntary takeover.
Pitman, who founded Pitman Manufacturing in 1950, RO Corporation in 1964 and Pioneer Engineering in 1993 is widely recognised as “the father of the truck-mounted boom crane”. In the past four years, through Pioneer, he has developed a new line of truck mounted cranes which, it is claimed, “incorporate a totally new approach to stability with the use of patented ‘X’ outriggers”.
Mega Manufacturing is a group of manufacturing companies with four divisions: a food processing equipment division, agricultural tillage tool division, metal fabrication equipment division, and a contract manufacturing division. Its introduction to the crane industry came as a primary manufacturing source for Simon-RO in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Mega and Pioneer designers and engineers collaborated on the first prototype in 1994 and have worked together ever since. New crane designs will be unveiled in March at Conexpo in Las Vegas.
“We have believed in the product design from its inception due to its ‘X’ outrigger design and unparalleled safety and stability,” said Mega president/CEO Bob Brown, who described the innovatively-configured outriggers as “the only new design concept in the past 25 years”.
In the wake of the merger Carl Best, who has been with Mega for more than 20 years, takes over as president of Pioneer.
Pitman himself, who turned 74 this month, said that he had no intention of retiring and planned to devote his considerable energies to product development and long range marketing, free of day to day hassles of running the company.
