Roboticist Chronicles: Bruce Arnold & Advanced American Technology Inc.
My guest on this episode is an old friend, Bruce E. Arnold. We are both Oil & Gas manufacturing guys starting back to the ’70s.
I have always had great respect and admiration for “Turnaround Guys”. These are the leaders who are brought in to fix companies in trouble. The rest of us find it hard enough just to run a solvent company. Bruce is a Turnaround Guy he enjoys the challenge of making unprofitable companies profitable again.
In 2001 Bruce was plant manager of a large valve company. Most turnaround guys focus on cutting costs, Bruce focuses on technology. A big part of his turnaround strategy is modernization to make companies competitive again.
Typically this means integrating state-of-the-art technology into a company. Bruce took it a step further, he and I worked together to advance the state of the art and create the first robotic hot wire gas tungsten arc clad welding system the ARC6G. He took a gamble on ARC Specialties and me. We went counter to all the conventional wisdom of sour service valve-clad welding. We left the part stationary and rotated the torch. We used a high-speed (40microsecond update) CNC controller. We eliminated the traditional dedicated arc height controller axis and instead went with vectored AVC using all servo axes.
This machine was so powerful and flexible that once when I was touring Bruce’s shop I was surprised to see my machines rewelding the crests of internal threads using helical interpolation, an application that neither one of us had envisioned.
Fast forward 25 years and Bruce has decided to take the plunge into entrepreneurship. He has started Advanced American Technology Inc. What this means is Bruce and I get to innovate together again. It will be a great pleasure to work with Bruce to help make his new endeavor a success.
I hope you enjoy Bruce’s story as much as I do.
