About Us
Honesty, Integrity, and Quality Workmanship
MTS has provided excellent quality service to its clients for over 40 years. During this time we have learned that many of our clients have never even known that a huge AST tank could even be lifted off the ground, let alone know how it should or should not be done.
This site is designed to be a useful resource for tank terminal operators and maintenance contractors to assure that they can make an intelligent decision on how to properly lift level and stabilize their tanks.
Full Disclosure
MTS has built its business on developing and employing state of the art equipment to service the petrochemical industry. MTS has done many case studies and has refined their procedures over several decades to assure that MTS remains second to none in their specialized field.
Through this experience MTS has determined that the absolute best and only way a tank should be lifted is using a unified oil volume delivery system and long stroke jacks that are capable of lifting tanks to the full desired lift height in one smooth stroke.
We therefore use and advocate this system, and for very good reasons which we will disclose to you with this website.
You will learn from this website;
- How tanks should properly be lifted, and how they should never be lifted.
- How any short stroke lifting system that requires multiple lifts and resets to acheive full lifting height will induce "Tank Wander"
- How improper lifting techniques will decrease a tanks service life.
- How reducing turnaround time by using the right lifting method can actually pay for your maintainance costs!
Satisfaction Guaranteed! Ask our clients, they will tell you!
About US MTS, also known as Mix Brothers Tank Services, has been lifting and moving tanks for over 30 years. Ron Mix grew up lifting and moving large and heavy things. As a boy, he worked with his father and uncles in the heavy moving and trucking industry. It was this experience that taught him the benefits of hydraulic jacking systems and the understanding of what was required to lift structures hydraulically without damaging them.
In 1971 Alex J Morrison was developing a tank building method for building large tanks from coiled strips of steel. To do this Mr. Morrison built several different lifting systems, all of which had some success, but when he saw that an obscure Canadian surplus store called Princess Auto was selling surplus long heavy duty hydraulic cylinders that were left over from the Apollo program, he bought enough of them to build a tank jacking system. These cylinders were originally designed to stand up the Saturn 5 rocket. So you could say tank jacking is rocket science.
Mix Brothers Tank Services had been lifting tanks and re-foundationing tanks for sometime when Alex Morrison and Ron Mix met. Ron was very interested in Alex's long hydraulic jacks and at some point convinced Alex to sell him some of his jacks. When Ron discovered how well they worked and experienced all the benefits there was from using them, he went back to Alex to buy some more. However instead, Alex told Ron where to go; and that was Princess Auto, where there were still many more of these jacks to be had. Ron Bought them all.
Ron Knew from experience that he would need a method of delivering an equal volume of oil to each jack to lift a tank properly and so he had Alex design him a system that would be suitable to handle the volumes of oil required for such large jacks, and since then Mix Brothers has been Hi-Lifting tanks ever since.
Over the years MTS has developed procedures and foundation designs that are long tested and proven. We know what does and does not work, we know what pitfalls tank owners get into when they use the wrong tank lifting methods to fix their tanks. This website is to educate those tank owners so they can make wise decisions on how to have their tanks repaired.
