Meet the demolition men. They're Giles Beland and Tim Willemsen, two former defensive linemen with the Mount Allison Mounties.

They helped take the fabled football squad to the Atlantic Bowl in the late 1980s; they earned degrees in economics; they entered the workplace five years ago, bound up in silk ties and brimming with ambition.

Today, you'll find both in scrubby coveralls and steel-toed boots, hauling old lumber and heaps of hope around a dusty brick warehouse on the outskirts of Sackville.

The difference is, it's their lumber and their scrap metal inside the warehouse they lease from Fawcett Foundry stove company, whose better days are now over. But things are just beginning for Mr. Beland and Mr. Willemsen, whose new company, Grindstone Services Inc., promises demolition with a difference.

Since November they've been dismantling old buildings with their bare hands. But instead of burning the scrap or taking it to the dump like their competitors, they truck it back to the cavernous old warehouse, sort it, store it and wait for customers in search of used lumber, old windows, aluminum doors and pedestal bathtubs. Just for a few extra dollars.

What these guys lack in hard business experience they make up with in energy. But no amount of entrepreneurial acumen could have prepared them for the learning curve of the last seven months.

"I was disillusioned with working for other people -- giving my all for someone else's dollar," says Mr. Beland. "It just didn't make sense."

He didn't have long to worry. Last year, his job with the Micmac Maliseet Development Corp. ended when the Moncton-based company went bankrupt. Mr. Willemsen was also unemployed after moving back East from a bank job in Ontario, to marry his fiancee. Neither he nor his old football buddy could find a job.

"Giles and I thought of starting something, housecleaning, consulting," says Mr. Willemsen. "Then one day I was at home watching a CBC documentary on a gentleman in Edmonton doing what we're doing now. We called him up and . . . milked him for as much information as we could."

The two started out with a $10,000 loan from the province and $5,000 of their own. That bought the lease on the warehouse, an old half-ton truck from J.D. Irving, a 5,000-watt generator and a set of used tools and chain saws.

The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency turned down a request for $1,000 for a trailer, saying they weren't running anything through a machine, weren't actually making a product.

But the word got out in Sackville that the two had set up shop, and the manager of the new McDonald's going up here offered Grindstone its first work: tearing down a giant barn -- Cedy Sears' old place -- near the construction site.

Without bulldozers or backhoes, they attacked the eyesore with old fashioned determination, and the help of a few friends promised six-packs as a reward.

The two knew their way around buildings from previous student construction jobs. And with a 1930s construction manual from the university library, they found out how things were built back then.

But Mr. Willemsen was afraid of heights. "We had to get up on the roof to tear down the tin, and I thought, 'Geez, would I ever like to be somewhere else now.' But we had to do it," he says.

Doing it for free was their first mistake. Thinking they'd make enough money selling the lumber and metal salvaged from the barn, they had decided not to charge for the actual demolition.

But back at the warehouse things stayed quiet, and so did the cash register.

"We realized fairly soon that it wasn't warehouse sales where we'd make our money, it was the service where we'd make our money" says Mr. Beland.

"Now we've learned not to do it for free. We want to at least cover our costs witht he demolition. We've got the price of our labour and our loan. Plus there's the $1-million of liability insurance we have to carry."

Yet the public doesn't see it that way. Poetential clients think they're doing Grindstone a favour by letting them loose inside their condemned buildings.

"If you owned a building and you wanted to hire a buddy with a dump truck and a high hoe to get it outta there, the [demolition man] would give a quote of $1,500 and you'd tell him to get rid of it," Mr. Beland explains.

"But when they call us in, because we're not busting it up, we're just dismantling it, people say, 'How much are you going to pay me?' But the service is the same, we're still demolishing the barn."

Their last big job was pulling down an old country store in Springhill, N.S., where they salvaged a horde of hardware from the last century -- wooden counters, pine floor-boards and hand-hewn ceiling beams. They don't make them like that anymore.

But selling the stuff won't pay the bills, and the two are in need of more demolition work, fast. The $15,000 has run out, and neither partner is drawing a salary, supported by UIC and working wives.

"We need a big job soon," says Mr. Beland. "But we have to compete against people that don't do the environmentally right thing, that come in and bust it up and demp it where it's not supposed to be."

So Grindstone's founders have turned to their survival instincts.

"We'll be manufacturing hot houses for peoples' gardens out of recycled windows this summer, and we're thinking about making kids' toys from wood scraps," says Mr. Beland.

They've also filled bags full of flammable scrap, for sale to campgrounds as fire-starter kits. And they're brokering with a Halifax company whose clients are looking for cast-iron sinks and recycled moldings to renovate and gentrify their 19th-century homes.

"That's the biggest thing I've learned since opening the business," says Mr. Willemsen. "We realize we have to bust our backs to get the business going, before we can hire a staff to do it. Then maybe when things get going we can save our backs and use our brains. There's lots of opportunity here."