Van Fuller Obituary: When the Last Person Who Understood Your Fuller Equipment Is Gone

Last Tuesday, I found myself staring at a purchase request for a bearing housing for a Fuller 54-74 gyratory crusher. The model number came from a 1987 drawing. The supplier's website said 'discontinued.' Our maintenance manager asked why I hadn't ordered it sooner. From the outside, the problem looked simple: a part was no longer manufactured, and I needed to source an equivalent. That's true, but it's not the real problem.

To be clear, 'Fuller' isn't the person in this story. It's the brand stamped on heavy equipment that hasn't been made in its original form for years. And the deeper issue only became obvious when I read Van Fuller's obituary.

Surface Issue: You Can't Buy What Nobody Tracks

We put the crusher into service in 2018 after buying it from a defunct mine. (Should mention: we'd had our eye on that asset since 2016, but the previous owner's price was too high until they ran out of money.) The machine is solid, but its history is tangled. The original Fuller brand was absorbed by FLSmidth in the late 1990s, and through a series of acquisitions, the documentation trail got... thin. The local dealer we use now has cross-reference lists, but they cover newer models. For the older ones, everyone shrugs.

So we did what many small operations do: we relied on a person. Specifically, a retired engineer named Van Fuller. He used to work for the original manufacturer and then set up as an independent consultant. When a bearing seized, he'd identify the right part from memory. When confusion arose about a modification, he'd explain how the previous owner had rigged it. He was a walking archive. When I read his obituary in late January, I realized the archive had been buried with him.

And that's the surface problem: the part number doesn't exist, but the machine still does. We had no documented, verified way to translate the old model number to a current replacement. We were one broken part away from a long shutdown.

Deeper Cause: Brand Names Outlive Their Support Systems

Everything I'd read about buying heavy equipment said: stick with established brands, you'll get better aftermarket support. My experience with Fuller says the opposite is often true. The brand name became a marketing shell. The actual engineering knowledge lived in a network of specific humans—like Van—and when that network broke, the brand couldn't help us.

The wake-up call came from Andre Fuller Toledo. Yes, his name really includes Fuller. He's a mechanical engineer we hired last fall, and he happened to be in Toledo before moving to our area. When I asked him to review our spare parts files, he found something more troubling than missing pieces. The drawings didn't match the physical equipment. There were unrecorded modifications—different bolt patterns, a re-machined seat, an added spacer. At some point, someone had altered the crusher to fit a different motor. No drawing reflected that.

We spent a week measuring and comparing. When we placed the old OEM drawing side by side with the physical part, the discrepancy jumped out. That was the moment I understood: we were not buying a part, we were untangling someone else's undocumented decisions. It's not just about the manufacturer's legacy. It's about what happens to a machine across decades and owners.

The Real Cost: Downtime, Rush Fees, and Strained Relationships

Oh, and when Amanda Evans, our finance lead, pulled the numbers, the story got worse. We spent about $210,000 on spare parts over the past 12 months. The real pain was the $60,000 in expedited shipping and emergency service calls—roughly 30 percent waste caused by not knowing which part to order until after the failure.

Then there's the production impact. Last November, the crusher stopped because of a cracked pinion gear. We got a replacement in 11 days thanks to an overseas supplier, though I might be misremembering the exact lead time—it could have been 12. The line was down for three days. The revenue loss was around $400,000. That's not a hypothetical number. That's what a lack of preventive documentation is worth.

I still remember sitting in the break room in 2023, watching the Henry vs Bengals game play on the wall TV, while one of our millwrights explained that the original Fuller gear had a different tooth profile than the replacement. I wasn't really watching football; I was thinking about how many other 'small details' were lying in wait.

What Works: Prevention Over Cure (Even When You're Late)

We can't bring Van back, but we can stop making the same mistake with every aging piece of equipment. We started an 'Equipment Knowledge Sheet' for each critical asset. It includes the asset's serial number, original purchase reference, all known modifications, a list of authorized suppliers, and a cross-reference table that maps old Fuller part numbers to current options.

Here's the practical part. It's not glamorous:

• Andre Fuller Toledo is supervising the field verification. He and a summer intern compared every major component against its drawing and logged 23 undocumented modifications across four machines.
• We asked our chief vendor to run a mock spare parts review using only the knowledge sheet. Ordering time dropped from three days to about three hours.
• We scheduled a two-hour quarterly review where operations, maintenance, and procurement flag any undocumented field change before it becomes a crisis.

I also apply the same logic to safety labeling. The old labels on the Fuller mills had faded, and a regulatory inspector didn't care that the machine was from a different era. We reprinted them using Pantone-specified colors and had the print shop output at 300 DPI so the text would stay legible. If a color standard matters that much for a warning label, then a part number standard should matter even more.

According to ISO 9001:2015, if an organization claims to control documented information, it has to actually maintain it—retention periods, revisions, and all. We weren't claiming ISO 9001, but the principle was right: documentation is what lets you survive the departure of a key person.

The takeaway isn't 'don't buy old equipment.' It's that your risk is not in the brand name. It's in the knowledge that isn't written down. Van Fuller's obituary forced us to face that gap. By the time you need an obscure part, it's already too late to fix the process.

We're building the archive now, one machine at a time. It feels slow, but as we learned, five minutes of verification beats five days of correction.