We are here in our booth at FABTECH 2022 in Atlanta. We are very excited about getting back to FABTECH. Jeremiah Wann talks about what to see at our booth as well as a little history of us showing here throughout the years.
Narrator: Welcome to the Dusty Jobs Podcast from Imperial Systems. Industry knowledge to make your job easier and safer.
Donovan: Hey. Once again I’d like to welcome everybody to the Dusty Jobs Podcast. We’re at FABTECH live.
Jeremiah: Yeah, no kidding.
Donovan: Today who is joining me is Jeremiah Wann, our owner. How are you doing today Jeremiah?
Jeremiah: I’m doing good, man. I’m sitting in the middle of our booth right now at FABTECH Atlanta.
Donovan: Well that’s pretty exciting.
Jeremiah: Yeah, pretty cool.
Donovan: It’s the first day. How many first day’s at FABTECH have you had now?
Jeremiah: Well, I don’t know exactly. I was thinking its somewhere between nine and ten. I wanted to say ten because it sounds better, like, “We’re celebrating our tenth anniversary at FABTECH,” but I’d have to fact check that. I’m not sure.
Donovan: Well there’s the pandemic and it kind of messed everything up. We’re all over the place with where things are.
Jeremiah: I never thought of that.
Donovan: Right. So, we’re excited to be here this year and that’s the point. We’ve got a great booth this year. I’m excited about all of the things we’ve got going on. What are the things in the booth that you think people should actually come by and see and check out here at FABTECH?
Jeremiah: Well, we have a lot of things. The Air-Port’s pretty cool, right? The Air-Port is our new modular weld hood. It’s free standing. It’s got integrated duct inside of the frame, the structure itself.
Donovan: Is it just a hood? When you say it’s an integrated weld hood…It’s not just a hood, right?
Jeremiah: It’s not just a hood, it’s not. It’s way more than that. It’s the first ever of it’s kind that actually has the dust collection ducting built right into the hood. So the legs of the hood, instead of taking up four spots on the ground that take up a lot of floor space, they only take up two places.
Donovan: Okay, so it’s not just a hood, it’s that the ducting is built into the hood?
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Donovan: There’s not four legs, there’s two?
Jeremiah: There’s two, it’s a big difference. So we all know that in manufacturing, floor space comes at a premium. Every square inch counts. The busier you get, the more you grow. You can’t just add a new building on that easily. We have to shrink our footprint all the time.
The Air-Port has the smallest footprint for the size hood of it’s kind. Where it really fits best is in the robotic welding industry. You can take this thing to an existing robot that you have in place and you want to capture the smoke and you can literally just set the Air-Port hood directly over the robot. It’s plug and play. It’s real simple to use.
Donovan: Now, in a lot of those applications a lot of time people are worried about sparks or safety devices.
Jeremiah: Not sometimes. Jeez, in robotic welding, sparks are probably the biggest threat. Because you’re putting the hood so close to the arm, and you don’t really know where the weld arm is going to be. Sometimes its going to be all the way up by the hood, other times it will be down by the ground. That’s robotic welding. So it’s a serious, serious threat, and what we did is when we built the Air-Port we decided that we wanted to go ahead and integrate a Spark Trap into the legs.
Donovan: So it’s built into the hood, basically?
Jeremiah: Oh, yeah. It’s built right into it, and if you come by the booth and check it out you’ll see that it bolts on so you can unbolt it to clean it out if it ever needs cleaned out.
Donovan: Wow.
Jeremiah: It’s pretty amazing. We’ve got videos online that can show you how efficient the Spark Trap is, how well it works. It also has a slot in it for an option, like if you want to hang parts with the crane and put it on a fixture. Pretty cool. A lot of these hoods, because they’re hanging from a ceiling they’re not strong enough to actually take a part from a crane and slide in there like this one. We kind of thought about it all.
Donovan: Now, what if – you said hanging from the ceiling – what if I don’t have anywhere for legs?
Jeremiah: Yeah, absolutely. We didn’t design it like that to begin with, we thought we just wanted to base it around an integrated duct in the legs, two leg footprint. So we kind of got blinded by that design. Later we realized that there are people that don’t want legs or they don’t have room for the legs or whatever. We said, “We’ll build it with an integrated duct built into the hood up top, but just a hanging model.”
Donovan: So there’s a central duct in the top that also supports the hood so you can actually hang it from the ceiling?
Jeremiah: Yeah, we’ve put these in at Tesla, we’ve put these in at some of the large robotic welding shops and people just love them. If you look on the website, and I can’t remember the exact time it takes to build them right now, but our competition to build an 8’ x 8’ hood might take 8 hours or something like that.
Donovan: Oh you mean when you get it to your facility and you put it together.
Jeremiah: Yeah, ours comes in on a skid, all the parts all nice and neat, all the hardware is all nice and neat with instructions on how to put it together. I mean, it might take an hour or something to put together, maybe two hours tops. So it’s just a really easy unit to put together. The other ones right now that are being made are being imported from China. They’re coming in in a thousand parts. You have to cut things with a saw. You have to lay stuff out. We had some of our most experienced installers take one out of a box from China, put it together, and they were not trying to skew it at all –
Donovan: It think we have a video on that.
Jeremiah: We do, yeah. Check it out, it’s pretty cool. It’s timelapsed, too, so it’s pretty fun.
Donovan: Nobody wants to sit there and watch those guys try to put those things together for how long it took them.
Jeremiah: That would probably be more boring than listening to us on a podcast.
Donovan: So that’s just one thing we have here at the booth. We have our CMAXX right here behind us. So if you’re watching this you can see we have our CMAXX here. It’s obviously our flagship product. We can run you through all the great things on that. We have not just the floor one, we have the elevated one. We have its, I don’t know, baby brother? What would you call the Shadow?
Jeremiah: The Shadow is here. I would say that this is the third FABTECH that the Shadow has been at. You’ve got the pandemic years in there. It’s been four years since the Shadow has launched. The Shadow was originally developed for the OEM market. It was developed for the laser manufacturers. So basically what it is is basically a CMAXX, but originally we tried to make it a cheaper, lesser version of the CMAXX to hit a price point. When we came back around and took it to the laser manufacturers, they loved it, and they loved the price point, but they kept saying, “Well, we like that heavier door on that CMAXX,” or, “We like that little bit of heavier gauge material, and we want to make sure we have the same filters and the same lift rails,” all the way down through the line. So eventually the Shadow just became the CMAXX with a different paint job on it.
Donovan: Well…
Jeremiah: Challenge me.
Donovan: I’m going to say that it’s a little bit different. Unlike the CMAXX, the Shadow is really easy to move around your shop if you need to. It’s a plug and play unit. Everything is contained in there. It’s not exactly like the CMAXX.
Jeremiah: I like to say it has CMAXX DNA. It’s basically built of a CMAXX but it has all the specific functions that it needs that laser people need.
Donovan: It has the HEPAs built in. Your fan is already wired up.
Jeremiah: Silencer is built in.
Donovan: The collection pan underneath it is right there ready to go.
Jeremiah: Integrated slide gate, so if you want to change it while you’re running your laser you don’t have to shut your laser down. It’s pretty cool.
Donovan: It takes up not a lot of shop space. It’s small. It’s got a real small footprint to it.
Jeremiah: It’s really taken off. Like all products, it’s been a little slow to begin with. It’s actually been one of our faster growing products.
Donovan: The other thing I like about our booth is if you don’t want to buy something, you can get things for free.
Jeremiah: Oh, we give away all kinds of stuff. There are people mad about that work for us. They’re kind of saying, “I can’t believe you’re going to give away a YETI cooler,” or the one they’re really mad about right now is, “I can’t believe you’re going to give away a $2,800 OneWheel.” I don’t know what to tell them. They need to get over it.
Donovan: It’s good to be a customer for Imperial Systems. Come by. Check our booth out and try your chance at winning something.
Jeremiah: I don’t think you have to be a customer to win it. I mean, you just have to drop a business card off in the cooler, and you might win a OneWheel, so its pretty cool.
Donovan: If you don’t know what they are, I’d say look them up.
Jeremiah: I think we should post the video on this podcast of me riding the OneWheel around the office.
Donovan: We could do that.
Jeremiah: I’m going to challenge to see that, because I am the best at it. I saw you do it.
Donovan: You were way better than I was Jeremiah. I’m glad I didn’t make it to the emergency room.
Jeremiah: Yeah, nobody did.
Donovan: We all made it out safe. This is also for FABTECH the first year that we don’t just have one booth, we have two booths. Our other booth is over in the B hall. That is our Imperial Filtration booth.
Jeremiah: This is the first year for two booths as FABTECH. This is the first year to do Imperial Filtration at FABTECH, or to ever have a booth at all. This is probably going on year two for Imperial Filtration. It’s a lot of exciting stuff. That business is a different division of Imperial Systems but we’re under the same roof. It’s taken off. It’s really grown a lot faster than we expected.
Donovan: So Imperial Filtration is exactly what it sounds like it is. It’s our filter company.
Jeremiah: It’s only filters. We only make filters at Imperial Filtration, so that’s all we do. We only make filters for dust collectors there.
Donovan: But not just for our dust collector.
Jeremiah: No. If you have a Robovent, or a Camfil, or a Donaldson, or whatever, we make filters for all of those. Direct, plug in filters for those.
Donovan: I’d say stop over there and see those guys.
Jeremiah: Heck yeah. I’ll be over there at some point today.
Donovan: Are you going to ride the OneWheel over?
Jeremiah: Maybe I’ll get a coffee first and just stroll on over.
Donovan: Well hey, thanks for talking a little bit about FABTECH and how much we enjoy being here. We’re hoping some people will stop by and see us. It’s been exciting.
Jeremiah: I just want to say that I think probably historically – hopefully we’ll still have these podcasts later, and I want to reflect back on this one later. I just want to say that I am amazed that from the nine or ten years ago it was where we did our first FABTECH with me and one or maybe two other people in the booth, driving here in my pickup truck with the borrowed trailer that I got from somewhere else and a couple pieces of scratched up equipment that we could put together with a little pop up banner that we had to trudging ahead ten years later and now we’re celebrating 21 years of business. I just want to remember, if we keep this podcast later, to remember I guess that I’m grateful that we’ve gotten here…
Donovan: It’s pretty exciting how far we’ve come.
Jeremiah: … and how things have kind of unfolded, right? So, ten years is not a long time, but if you are always doing the right thing, and you have a plan, and you’re keeping yours eyes on the future, with a plan in the future, it just happens. You either have a plan for the future or you don’t, and you have the plan for the future, and it’s a good one, then your future should be good. Nothing is guaranteed, but I’m pretty pleased.
Donovan: There have probably been some people that have stopped by our booth for every FABTECH.
Jeremiah: Yeah, there has been.
Donovan: The reason that we are this size and have been able to do this is because of our customers.
Jeremiah: Yeah, the reason we are able to take time right now to do a podcast in the middle of the trade show is because we’ve grown. In years past I never would have sat down in the middle of a trade show for anything, let alone a podcast.
Donovan: There are plenty of people here to help.
Jeremiah: There are. We have a lot of people here.
Donovan: Come by. See us.
Jeremiah: Yeah, come by and see us for sure.
Donovan: We’re excited about it.
Jeremiah: Thanks Donovan. I appreciate it.
Donovan: We appreciate you too.
Jeremiah: Good job on the podcast.
Donovan: Thanks. We’re going to keep going. See us here. See us over at our Filtration booth. Until the next time we talk to everybody, stay health and stay safe out there.
Jeremiah: Alright, sounds good. Thanks man.
Donovan: Alright, bye.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Dusty Jobs Podcast. Breathe better, work safer.
