"We wanted to see if we couldn't go ahead and take it to the limit," Scheid said. "We set up a truck specifically for truck-pulling. It's grown quite rapidly over the past few years." the growth, Scheid said, came for the same reason he moved from Plainville to terre Haute in 1982. His customers demanded it, and in the years since, those customers have developed into the top names in diesel sled-pulling.
According to Scheid's estimates, about 35 percent of Scheid Diesel's business is diesel competition and innovation.
"It defiitely is the most fun part," Scheid said. "It creates the enthusiasm within the business. It's the most challenging part to make you want to get up and go to work in the morning and have some enthusiasm. the demand was the main thing, I guess-something interesting for the employees to do, as well. I have a lot of enthusiasm for this type of work. I love doing the high-performance side of it. We have a lot of employees who have the same feelings."
HIGH-PERFORMANCE PARTS
"We worked on diesel injection pumps to begin with. that evolved into getting more into the high-performance fuel-injection systems, turbos and water injections. from that point, it evolved into actually working on the engines themselves, setting up the engines and settingup the complete units and setting up the trucks.
"I guess it all goes hand in hand, for the most part." In time, Scheid did more than develop engines for drivers. He developed them to the point where even drivers who weren't driving Scheid trucks were driving Scheid motors.
"Everybody's trying to play catch-up now, but some of your other motor builders in the united States-they still buy parts from Scheid, because they built some of the best parts and systems: water injection systems, fuel pumps, different things," Smith said. "A motor builder might say, 'this is my motor,' but the internal parts might be Scheid.