My grandfather was obsessed with several things during his lifetime. One obsession was any wild game whose habitat included the land, sea, or air. Another was the quality of his products. He told me one time that if I cheapened the instruments after he was gone, he would come back to haunt me. Another of his obsessions, and not the least, was ensuring the success of his customers. He truly was less concerned about selling products than he was about making sure people knew how to use them after they were purchased. It is somewhat sad that today’s culture, which is oversaturated with hyperbole, will probably cause people to doubt what I am saying. But I kid you not, that’s how he was.

While traveling into sawmills in the United States and Canada over the past few years, we at Brunson Instrument Company saw an unfulfilled need in the area of machine center alignment. Most sawmills whether small or large, producing anywhere from 25 mbf (25 thousand board feet annually) to 125 mbf and greater were still practicing old mechanical methods of lining up key machine centers. Using piano wire, dial indicators, feeler gauges and mechanical levels was more common than utilizing a highly accurate, repeatable instrument for important measurements.

Contributing Editor: Ray Ryan, Vice President of Sales, East Coast Metrology

East Coast Metrology (ECM) has a client who requires a special rectangular X-Ray fixture to be placed at the center of their imaging room to calibrate the position of the X-Rays relative to the treatment beam. Originally, each time the client wanted the X-Ray system checked for alignment, the fixture would need to be measured and moved accordingly until it was centered accurately. This required the measurement of 3 planes, construction of intersecting geometry, building a reference frame from the geometry and finally computing the corrections.  The process was iterative and very time consuming since the positioning tolerance was very tight (+/- 0.1 mm).

In 1927, my grandfather, A. N. Brunson, was 22 years old. That was the year he established Brunson Instrument Company in the back room of a map business in downtown Kansas City, repairing surveying instruments. When the Great Depression came along, he was fortunate to keep very busy because no one could afford new instruments – so they came to him to repair their old ones.

My grandfather was a very persistent thinker and inventor. He saw the instruments that came across his workbench, and analyzed what went wrong with them. He was always thinking of ways to improve their design. During the dustbowl of the 1930s, he saw how dust destroyed the main bearing systems of those transits and levels. He knew there had to be a better way. This led him to his very first patent – the “Brunson dustproof ball bearing spindle”. It became a hit and he started retrofitting this base on a lot of other manufacturers’ instruments.

East Coast Metrology is an ISO 9001-certified provider of precision measurement services for a diverse client base of manufacturers. Many of their customers must comply with stringent ISO and accreditation guidelines in order to serve industries such as aerospace, nuclear, power generation, medical and more. For their close-tolerance field measurement jobs, East Coast Metrology engineers reach for a portable measurement solution consisting of a laser tracker, retro-reflectors and target holders. Down to the smallest component of this system, each element must be calibrated, serialized and certified using NIST-traceable tools. All to meet the exacting standards of their customers. 

By the late 1940s, Brunson Instrument Company occupied a two story building in downtown Kansas City. We had been manufacturing surveying instruments, but by that time, my grandfather was getting into industrial measurement equipment. The demands of making this new, highly accurate product caused him to realize that his building was being rattled by street cars and trucks on the street. He and his crew had to wait until the wee hours of the morning to perform some of the delicate manufacturing operations and calibrations required for this new product line. Finally he got tired of this.

We at Brunson Instrument Company live in a specialized world of industrial measurement. We deal with the measurement problems faced by people who build, inspect, or maintain fairly large machines – machines like aircraft, paper mills, sawmills, satellites, ships, machine tools, particle accelerators, and automobiles, to name a very few.