Ian MacGregor, a partner with North West Capital Inc. and lifelong collector of historical metal making tools stands on the floor of his private museum, west of Calgary on Wednesday, February 09, 2011.Chris Bolin for The Globe and Mail
It is a deceptively rustic scene - a remote ranch house perched on a windy promontory, with postcard-perfect views of the Alberta foothills and mountains.
But beneath the ground, 2,000 years of industrial history lie buried. The house provides access to a twisting tunnel of brightly lit galleries and displays containing gears, tools, pumps and thousands of metal objects.
At the heart of this subterranean trove is a 60-ton steam engine named Mary, lovingly salvaged from the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in northern England and rebuilt in the middle of Cowboy Country.
"It's a pretty cool thing," enthuses Ian MacGregor, the Calgary investor, engineer and collector whose lifelong passion for metal and history has forged this underground time capsule - the 20,000-square-foot Canadian Museum of Making.
Yet Mr. MacGregor, 61, is no escapist lost in dreamy nostalgia. He is the driving force behind one of Canada's most ambitious industrial ventures - the planned $5-billion North West upgrader-refinery, which recently cleared a key hurdle in announcing an oil-sands sourcing agreement with the province of Alberta.
His collection lies at the intersection of work, hobby and obsession. "I'm interested in how to make things from metal," says Mr. MacGregor, who, between his foothills ranch and his Calgary office, owns up to 20,000 artifacts spanning technology from first-century Africa to the mid-20th century auto industry.
His love of forging and machining started early, as an only child in Calgary, wandering on Saturdays into the machine shop where his father worked and picking up stuff in junkyard excursions.
Since then, his life has followed a classic Alberta track - he lost a business in the aftermath of the 1980 national energy program; he made a fortune selling another; and now he is heading a private equity group, North West Capital Inc., to invest in big, tough projects.
He has stepped back from his career three times, waiting out cyclical downturns by building his collection. He first set out to amass steam indicators - ornate devices that monitored pressure in steam engines - and he now owns hundreds. In the mid-1990s, he began excavating beneath his family-owned ranch, about 70 kilometres west of Calgary, to create a showcase.
The underground site reflects his revulsion at going to estate sales and seeing scavengers pick through the bones of a meticulously assembled collection. By putting it all underground, he ensures the collection can't be broken up easily. Also, the tunnels are energy-efficient and "the ranch is a beautiful place, so why spoil the view?"
The non-profit museum - a collaboration with other enthusiasts - attracts about a tour a month, often from engineering, art and technical colleges. "I try to show my students the roots of their trade," says one frequent visitor, Rob Sadowski, a machinist and millwright who teaches at SAIT, the Calgary technology college. "They are absolutely fascinated."
They are not much younger than Mr. MacGregor was when, fresh out of engineering school, he borrowed $2,500 from his father to buy a truck and some welding tools to repair oil rigs - a business he lost in the post-NEP meltdown of the 1980s.
For his current project, he teamed up with Calgary lawyer Gary Lee to form North West Capital. "We try to do things that are technically complicated and cost a lot of money," he explains.
The firm's downtown offices reflect Mr. MacGregor's quirky decorating tastes. Visitors ascend to the 11th floor penthouse, where the elevator opens onto a dark, dingy cinder-block room, with safety-caution signs and a workman's locker.
Beyond this faux maintenance room lies a big bright office with more tools on display, dominated by a red steam-powered fire engine built in the 1880s for a paper mill near Aberdeen, Scotland. For Mr. MacGregor, the real fun was deploying a 200-ton crane to hoist it up to the penthouse and through a rebuilt window.
Still, he worries about the single-minded state of engineering today, with its emphasis on utility. Looking at his African bronze headgear and Victorian gears, he says engineers who want to leave a legacy of work for future generations must make things with great form as well as good function. One of his goals is to get art and engineering students talking to each other.
Seven years ago, he and his North West team observed that the oil sands would soar in value, but the future lay not in big mining projects but in more compact, and environmentally friendlier, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SagD) technology that reaches far below the surface.
That was the seed of North West Upgrading Inc., which aims ultimately at a three-phase project, valued at potentially $15-billion, in a joint venture with Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.
With Alberta agreeing to feed the upgrader with bitumen earned as royalties-in-kind, Mr. MacGregor has five years of hard work ahead before focusing back on his collection.
But he has his eye on this old steam engine in England that weighs about 400 tons. If he could just pair it up with Mary, it would give him two metallic Mona Lisas in a much-expanded gallery.
And for Mr. MacGregor, most of the fun will be moving it from Britain to his Alberta cavern. "It would be like raising the Titanic to get it here."