This is the first episode of our monthly podcast on industry safety and dust collection. In this episode Donovan and Justin go over some of the topics that we will cover on in future episodes. They talk safety, products, news and more. Also they mention the industry leaders that will be guests on the show as well as some on-site recordings at different trade shows. We are all very excited about the future episodes and can’t wait for you to hear them. Breathe Better, Work Safer.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Dusty Jobs podcast from Imperial Systems, industry knowledge to make your job easier and safer.
DONOVAN: Hello, welcome to the Dusty Jobs podcast; this is our very first podcast. Today we are in Mercer, Pennsylvania at Imperial Systems headquarters. I’m sitting here with Justin Badger: how are you doing, Justin?
JUSTIN: Doing pretty good. I’m excited about this.
DONOVAN: Excited about our first podcast. For those of you who don’t know about Imperial Systems, we are a dust and fume collection equipment company. Justin, tell them what our mission statement is here.
JUSTIN: Our mission is to improve the health, safety, and quality of people’s lives by building the best dust and fume collectors on Earth.
DONOVAN: That’s right, and we’ve been doing that for 18 years now in the industry. We’ve been building products, helping install things…
JUSTIN: Absolutely.
DONOVAN: Helping people with full installations down to just replacement parts. We’ve been doing that for 18 years.
JUSTIN: Yeah, we’re excited in this podcast. That’s what we’re going to talk a lot about. We’re going to talk a lot about dust collection and how we can and how we do improve people’s lives.
DONOVAN: Right.
JUSTIN: By cleaning the air, basically.
DONOVAN: We’re going to be going beyond that, too.
JUSTIN: Absolutely. We have plans to talk about a lot of environmental health and safety topics, including many different OSHA-related things… ladder safety and compliance, and combustible dust safety.
DONOVAN: But it’s not going to be just you and me talking about this. We’re going to have other people on. Industry experts, going to some on-location places to meet up with some people to talk about different topics.
JUSTIN: We do different trade shows. We’ll be at GEAPS in March and have a couple of episodes that we’re going to record there about different topics that are related to the grain market. We’ll also do FABTECH, which is a metals manufacturing and fabrication show; we do that one every November. It’s in Las Vegas this year, so we’re really excited to have some industry experts, either environmental health and safety like we talked about before, or other machinery or equipment safety. So we have a lot of different ideas we’d like to talk about on this show. But how can people contribute on their own?
DONOVAN: Well, we’ve got a lot of different ways you’re going to be able to help tell us what you guys would like to hear. We’re going to get to those at the end of the podcast. But right now… what do you do here, Justin? What’s your role here at Imperial?
JUSTIN: I’m the national sales and marketing manager.
DONOVAN: There you go. My name’s Donovan Karki, and I’ll be helping to cohost this podcast. I do sales here at Imperial Systems, so now you know a little more about what we do and maybe a little bit more about what Imperial does. Like we said, we build products here, and I think Justin’s going to give us a little bit of a rundown on a brief equipment line of what we have. We’re not going to be talking about this all the time, but at least you know what we’re doing.
JUSTIN: We make a lot of different dust collection equipment. Some of our main pieces of equipment, of course there’s the CMAXX Dust and Fume Collector. That’s our flagship product. If you’ve heard of Imperial Systems before, you probably know the CMAXX dust collector. We also manufacture the BRF, which is a round baghouse, and a cyclone. We recently introduced the Shadow. We’re really excited about the Shadow dust collector, because there’s a lot of markets that it can fit into, such as laser cutting, like steel laser cutting, or robotic welding. I’m really excited about the robotic welding application because it’s growing. There’s not enough fabricators and stuff out there and a lot of companies are turning toward robots to fill that need, and when robots are doing the work they’re creating a lot of dust and fume, and the Shadow is perfect for filtering that dust in environmentally safety-conscious companies.
DONOVAN: Right, and we also handle other products. You know, for explosive dust, we have the Spark Trap, we have the Rhino Drum, we have… you know, just other accessories that go along with that. We can help with just about everything out there that’s in the dust collection world. I mean, what are all the things we help with? We can help with installation, we can help with product design…
JUSTIN: Absolutely. We are one of the only companies in the United States that can provide full turn-key solutions, from the initial quote to engineering and design to manufacturing the actual machinery, installing that machinery, and servicing the machinery on a follow-up.
DONOVAN: Now, we’re telling you about that because we want to let you know that we’re going to have people who cover all these topics coming on the podcast, talking about what they do. Everyone from installation to service techs to engineering aspects. And if you have any of those questions, you can let us know. You can let us know what you what you’d like to hear. We have industry leaders in all of those topics and all those categories that can come on and talk. What are some ways people could let us know about that? I know we’ve got an email address set up: it’s dustyjobspodcast@isystemsweb.com. Then we have social media… what are our social media sites?
JUSTIN: We’re on LinkedIn and Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… you can find us on any of those. DM us with some ideas we can do in future podcasts.
DONOVAN: Right.
JUSTIN: So one of the things I’m really excited about with this podcast is that most of the episodes are going to be on serious topics, but in the near future I’m really excited to have some people who have been in this industry for a long time, and if you’ve been in this industry long enough, there’s some pretty funny stories that they’ve done different dust collectors on, so that will be exciting to hear some of the history… I mean, thirty years ago, dust collection was done way different than it is today. It’ll be pretty interesting to learn a little bit about the history of dust collection…
DONOVAN: We even have some guys in our own shop that have been doing this for thirty years. They have some insight, have some stories, some things I’ve heard from them…
JUSTIN: There’s some interesting things that dust collectors are used on that people don’t even know about.
DONOVAN: Right.
JUSTIN: So it’s pretty cool. That’ll be a great episode to talk about, just a little light-hearted funny episode about some neat things.
DONOVAN: Yeah. I know one of the other episodes, we’re talking about having is possibly not just on the collector itself, but things that surround the collector. Safety… one of the topics we’ve just recently been talking about is ladder safety. I know we’re going to be covering some of that, and that can be really confusing at times.
JUSTIN: Absolutely.
DONOVAN: Different standards, OSHA and what it requires…
JUSTIN: Yeah, and one of the most important topics we’re going to cover is NFPA compliance for combustible dust. It is a hot topic right now, and with new regulations around dust hazard analysis, and then once you’ve done a dust hazard analysis, what do you do with that information for your needs in the future to make sure that you’re protecting your employees’ health and safety, your local community, and you know, the air we all breathe.
DONOVAN: It seems like weekly we’re reading stories, well, not weekly but monthly about some explosions that are happening because of just dust not being handled properly.
JUSTIN: We’re going to cover that for sure. It’s very important.
DONOVAN: We’re going to try to help get some information out there so that happens less.
JUSTIN: Yeah, that’s for sure. I’m looking forward to those ones.
DONOVAN: Yeah, and we’ve got a lot of other topics coming up. Like we said before, if you have anything you want to hear, let us know. We’re going to be excited to talk about those things. But as for today, I think that’s about all we have.
JUSTIN: Thanks for listening. We look forward to hearing from you about some different ideas.
DONOVAN: Drop us a line, let us know, look us up, and we’ll be coming back and hopefully talking on the things you guys want to hear about because you’ll let us know. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening to the Dusty Jobs podcast. Breathe better, work safer.
