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. 

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.