The Diesel Queen gets “Hands-on” with Hitachi

I stumbled upon another woman who is certainly making a name for herself on the internet this weekend, and figured it might make for a good post here on the Digger Man Blog.

Melissa Petersmann (28) is a diesel mechanic who hails from Wyoming, in the Western United States of America. I have obviously been living under a rock, as when I dived a bit deeper, I quickly discovered that not only is she a mechanic working in a heavily male dominated industry, she is also and entrepreneur who has built up a massive online presence which quite simply dwarfs many others on the circuit.

On Instagram “The Diesel Queen” has amassed over 521k followers from 2,912 posts, whilst only following a tiny 759 other accounts, while on Tik Tok she has a mega following of over 955k + followers!

Melissa was brought up around logging equipment, which is very familiar in the region, where timber is big business. With her father working in the industry, it was a pretty logical course for her to also join the logging game as a mechanic, this included a seven-year stint working at John Deere dealerships.

Most recently she has been doing some promotional work with Hitachi Construction Americas, which has seen her test driving some of their machines, including the ZW50 compact wheeled loader.

Checkout how she gets on with the ZW50 in the video below.