This is the Dusty Jobs Podcast episode from Fabtech Orlando 2024. In this episode we talk with Tomm Frungillo. Tomm talks about the booth and all that Imperial Systems has in their booth this year. He also talks about a new product the Shadow Ambient collector that can go into any shop to help clean the air. Donovan also gets excited about our model train and model building that we have in our booth.
Narrator: Welcome to the Dusty Jobs podcast from Imperial Systems. Industry knowledge to make your job easier and safer.
Donovan: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Dusty Jobs podcast. We are at Fabtech 2024.
Tomm Frungillo: We are.
Donovan: And so far it’s been a good show. We were a little worried coming down here. Tomm Frungillo is with me today our national sales manager. How’s the show going for you, Tomm?
Tomm: It’s good, Donovan, real good. Probably better than we expected. We didn’t know what to expect, like you said with the storm. Everybody knows about the hurricane, but Orlando was hit a little bit, not so bad. But the question is, when would they open up to let us in, to set up? There was some delay there, not a big delay. Everything’s gone smooth and the people that are here seem to be really interested in being here.
Donovan: And I’ll tell you what, even with a little bit of time delay on what the booth turned out great this year. It’s amazing. We have so many cool features this year. It’s totally different than anything we’ve done in the past.
Tomm: Yeah, it really is.
Donovan: We’ve got this really great big mezzanine where we can show people our dust collectors, show them the CMAXX, do a demonstration up there. And underneath it, I mean, I’m gonna let you talk about this, Tomm. This is just the coolest thing. So many people are checking it out.
Tomm: Yeah, well, to start with this booth design and configuration and the equipment we have in it is fantastic. It’s the best one we’ve ever done.
Donovan: Oh yeah.
Tomm: This is my, I guess, sixth or seventh with Imperial Systems and this is by far the best one. And I think it’s because of the configuration, we’ve got some new equipment in here. We’ve taken our traditional Shadow unit and made it into an ambient offering where we can collect ambient weld fume. And all plug and play in a beautiful little system and that’s been getting a ton of attention. And then a lot of our traditional equipment where they’re showing off our CMAXX and our standard Shadow and our Air-Port and Spark Traps and everything the metalworking world needs.
Donovan: But we’ve got a train set.
Tomm: We do and I’m getting to that.
Donovan: My gosh, okay.
Tomm: You can’t go for the kill up front. You gotta build up to it.
Donovan: I didn’t mean to steal your thunder, Tomm.
Tomm: So in addition to all of that cool stuff, we have a train set. We have a guy that does installation work for us, as you know.
Donovan: Yep.
Tomm: Great guy and as a hobby he does models and he does trains and he does models with trains and does amazing work.
Donovan: It’s great.
Tomm: So several of us, our great marketing team and us we got together several months ago and said, maybe that would be a cool thing to put at Fabtech. What would that look like? So as it turns out, as you said, we’ve got a mezzanine with a CMAXX dust collector, a mezzanine to work to access it all above.
Donovan: Yep.
Tomm: But below that, we have this train set and model. And the model happens to be of our shop, as you know, in Mercer, Pennsylvania.
Donovan: Yeah, it’s great, yeah.
Tomm: So it really turned out, we were all watching it being built and it’s like, man, this is kind of cool, but what’s it going to look like and how are the details going to be and what are we really going to end up with? And quite honestly, even the last time I saw it, which was about a month and a half ago maybe, it was really looking good. But it was like this thing needs to have a little bit more. And by the time I got here a couple days ago and we had it all set up, it just really exceeded my expectations of what it was going to be.
Donovan: I’ve watched five people take a picture of it since we’ve been sitting here talking so far.
Tomm: Yeah, yeah.
Donovan: And the cool part about our shop for me is that it kind of gives you an X-ray of our shop, you’re looking through it like you’re Superman. And it’s so great because our shop has so many different types of fume collection in it for ourselves.
Tomm: Right.
Donovan: We’ve got the ambient system. We’ve got a robot cell. We’ve got it on our laser table. We’ve got it on the plasma table. And Brian and the marketing team were able to take all that, miniaturize it. So that we’re able to show people here at the show an actual facility of what dust collection looks like in our facility. Not just the actual equipment here, but they can see how it might look in their own shop. And I think that’s just great.
Tomm: It is. And I’ve, people that we, we love people coming to our shop, right? And then it sells itself to some extent. And so, but a lot of people that are at the show, I’ve said, you know, for a couple years now, we need to get you up there. We need to get, well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you just come to the booth. And I’ll show you what our shop looks like in miniature scale. And it’s been a big hit, you know, in addition to all the ones you mentioned, we have the powder coat booth.
Donovan: That’s right.
Tomm: That’s there with dust collection on it. So we really kind of cover so many things that are here for people at the show. It’s showing them our shop at the same time. Plus it’s fun, I mean it’s a train. And we have a restaurant and a bar at the end of the train track.
Donovan: There’s a little town.
Tomm: It’s a little town and it’s just so cool. And I’m guessing the marketing team, Scott and Erin, are probably going to put maybe some pictures together when this comes out. So we flash to it so people can see what we’re talking about.
Donovan: And there’s a, I know Justin did a video already of the whole booth. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, you could probably find that video or on Facebook too.
Tomm: Yes.
Donovan: So, but, all right, so that’s the booth. But I want to go back. I want to talk again about the new shadow ambient collector.
Tomm: Yes.
Donovan: Okay. So, tell me how is this different than just a regular Shadow? What am I getting different? Is it just have a pipe on it? What’s the big difference between it and our standard Shadow?
Tomm: Well, the beauty of it is there’s so many great things about the standard Shadow, right? Our vertical cartridge nature, our Safety Pentagon, all these things that I won’t go into all that now. But it takes that beautiful Shadow box and just to go back even further, you know, why is it called a Shadow, right? So it’s called a Shadow because in this industry, people wanted something that sat in the Shadows. You turned it on, it worked, you turned it off, it didn’t like your lights. They wanted a light switch, dust collector. And so we said, why don’t we call it the Shadow? It sits in the shadows. It is black, you know, which most people like in this industry. And so the Shadow itself works so well as a fume collector. But as you know, a lot of people love the plug and play nature, but they just want ambient filtration. In other words, not source capture, not the ambient racetrack push-pull system.
Donovan: Right.
Tomm: But a collector that just sits there and works on its own, pulling in ambient air and blowing out clean air. So we said, let’s take that Shadow, we’ve already got it perfected. All we have to do is take an intake, raise it up to where most of that weld smoke sits, somewhere between 12 and 15 feet, right? Most of the weld smoke sits right there. We’ll pull it from there. We know we can cover a 7 to 8,000 square foot area with one of these, based on how we have this size. We pull it in, goes through, it gets cleaned, it gets filtered. It gets pulse cleaned when it gets up to a certain differential, it cleans itself. And then we just spit out clean air right there in the facility. It’s all plug and play, bring it in with a forklift, set it, run your power, run your compressed air, and it’s ready to go. Simple.
Donovan: So it’s the Shadow, it’s got a collection unit high, where we have that hover zone for weld fume.
Tomm: Correct.
Donovan: Pulls it in, cleans it, pumps the air back out low?
Tomm: It does. It does. Takes it in high, pumps it out low, even real nice distribution, diffuser plate to distribute it evenly throughout the floor.
Donovan: Now is that a piece that’s hanging off the side of it, or is it just like-
Tomm: It’s flush. >>
Donovan: It’s tight up against it?
Tomm: It is, it’s basically flush mounted. So we built onto the Shadow just a little bit of a plenum. And then did a nice diffuser to kind of, the air’s running slow, it comes out, it’s quiet, just a nice diffused air, clean air coming back in your shop.
Donovan: The actual footprint of it then, it didn’t really get that much bigger, is what you’re telling me.
Tomm: It did not, inches bigger, inches bigger is all. So it really, and as you know, we’ve had tremendous interest in this. Because there’s others, types that are similar on the market, but nothing that has taken all the great things about the Shadow and then the nice innovation that we added to it to make it something that’s really kind of better than anything that’s on the market.
Donovan: Yeah.
Tomm: And reasonably priced.
Donovan: And you know what, here’s the thing I like about it, is our industry, there’s a lot of people who are growing. Shops are growing, they’re getting more people. So we’ll meet people each year at the show. And last year they had three welders working for them, they have six welders working for them this year. And as those company grow, they can take this unit, if they got to move into a bigger facility, they just buy another one.
Tomm: That’s right.
Donovan: And put it there, so it can grow with you. It’s not like, now we move somewhere else. We got to leave this piece of equipment behind, it was an investment we made. Now we have to re-figure out our whole system.
Tomm: That’s right.
Donovan: You just, as you grow, you just get another one.And then you can just get another one, or maybe you get a robot, and you can get another Shadow dedicated to that. So that’s what I love about it.
Tomm: Well it is, and then for companies that are on tight budgets, right? They may have some areas of their shop are a little more heavy in air pollution from welding and grinding and other things than other areas of their shop. They may want to ventilate and filter all their air in their shop. But they may not have the budget to do that. So let’s set one here this year, or two here this year. We can do two more next year, we can do two more after that. And invest a relatively small amount of money now as opposed to a large amount of money that a bigger system requires.
Donovan: You know what’s also great about it, Tomm? With the fork pockets and the lugs on top, you aren’t set to this one spot. They can move it in their shop.
Tomm: Yes.
Donovan: To say, okay, well, it’s actually working a little better over here. It’s working a little better over there.
Tomm: Sure you can.
Donovan: And you can kinda dial it in to where your most trouble areas are.
Tomm: Yeah, I mean, and no duct work, so you can put it and change it. Obviously, you have to change a little bit of your wiring and your compressed air run, no matter where you put it. But most plants, that’s pretty minor. Pretty minor change.
Donovan: You get that new piece of equipment, you gotta change your flow. It’s not a huge rip out. It’s not, you just pick it up, you move it, you got to the new spot where you gotta move your guys.
Tomm: Simple, inexpensive with all sorts of options.
Donovan: And all that’s doing in the end is that’s helping people go home healthier, safer to their families at the end of the day. And that’s all we’re trying to do here at Imperial is keep that up.
Tomm: Anybody that has been around weld at smoke for any length of time knows that it’s not a good thing and it affects every part of your body. And over time, it’s very unhealthy, so these things do that along with it. That’s why we’re in business, right? To improve the health, safety, and quality of people’s lives.
Donovan: Right.
Tomm: By making the best equipment on Earth. That’s what we do. It’s our mission statement. This is just adding to that.
Donovan: Yeah, I love that it’s just that other simple next step that we can do. To help a small business owner. To help someone who’s just trying to get started. That they don’t have to have their employees be sick or deal with all that. They can really just start out small and then when they grow, we can grow with them.
Tomm: Yeah, and we have that here at the show. There’s the big companies, there’s the Caterpillars and the Komatsu and all the huge companies. And then there’s the small guys, right? And this along with all our equipment can work for both of those types of companies. We can take care of the large big companies that have dozens of welding cells and grinding booths and whatever they’re doing. And we can handle mom and pop too. In a good way. Yep. So that’s what we do.
Donovan: So that’s super exciting. That’s our new stuff we got going on this year. We still have all the old stuff going on. If you have a chance to come up, I think the train’s going back to the shop. Is that where it’s going to be?
Tomm: That’ll end up in our showroom and it’s going to be very versatile to where when we have a customer coming in, we can do some things specific to that customer. Another little store, another little private labeled collector, another little whatever we can do.
Donovan: So it’s going to keep evolving?
Tomm: It’s going to evolve. And then our plan I’m sure is to bring it to next year’s Fabtech and it’ll be an evolved model. That’ll be bigger, better than ever.
Donovan: Yeah, maybe there’ll be an ambient Shadow in it next year.
Tomm: I’m sure there will be.
Donovan: There we go. There we go. Well, Tomm-
Tomm: By the way, we already sold the one that we have on the floor. We sold yesterday, so it didn’t take long for us to-
Donovan: Well, get them, they’re going fast.
Tomm: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of, we can make a lot of them though, Don.
Donovan: Yeah, we got more?
Tomm: We can do more.
Donovan: We got more for sale. That’s good.
Tomm: We know how to do it.
Donovan: That’s good. We’ll be making more shortly.
Tomm: That’s it. That’s it.
Donovan: Well, Tomm, thanks for taking a minute away from the booth to come talk to us. And we just really appreciate it. So if you’re listening, like us on all our social medias, Facebook, LinkedIn, come check us out on YouTube. And until next time, stay healthy and stay safe, and thanks for listening.
Tomm: Thank you.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Dusty Jobs podcast. Breathe better, work safer.
