Employees, customers, and vendors celebrated the 50th anniversary of Electronics Inc. with a party on June 21. We will have photos in the next issue of The Shot Peener.
A brief recap of EI’s history: The early projects at EI met the demands of the 1974 Clean Air Act by providing air pollution controls to reduce dirty air in American steel factories. The first product was a simple fan damper control that allowed remote setting of air volume for a baghouse dust collector. Eventually this evolved into feedback controls that regulated the damper position based upon desired motor power limits since the load changed with the air temperature. Another control model then detected the temperature of the air going into the baghouse system which would quickly open cold air dampers to dilute the hot air so that the bags were not damaged.
These controls were developed in cooperation with Wheelabrator-Frye in Mishawaka, Indiana. They already made abrasive blast cleaning machines for foundries that required baghouse dust collectors. They eventually spun that division off to Rust Engineering in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania as the Air Pollution Control Division.
The experience gained from that association led to a Wheelabrator project with Boeing Commercial Airplane for wing skin peen-forming. A sixteen-wheel mono-rail machine provided the saddle-back shape to the wing skin and I got to provide the media flow rate controls. This alerted me to the shot peening market and I was soon making MagnaValves for wheel-type and air-type peening machines.
EI is now shipping products and providing shot peening training around the world. None of this would have been possible without the support of our employees, customers, distributors, and vendors.
