Epner Technology Blog

Rob Brueggeman and I recently returned from exhibiting at SPIE's Defense, Security & Sensing tradeshow in Baltimore. This is the big IR camera and night vision meeting and our little tabletop had the usual Laser Gold stuff with the emphasis on "cold shields." Also known as a radiation shields, this component plays a critical role in many of the products on display at this exhibit.

For the first time in more years than I can remember, I will not be attending the SPIE Photonics West Conference in San Francisco. I will be celebrating my membership in the "Octogenarian Club" by skippering a 54-foot sloop in the British Virgin Islands (with a crew of four wonderful, funny and interesting guys).

I have begun this blog on a Monday night, just one week to the day that I watched New York Harbor creep slowly up the street on which I live.  It never got closer than 300 feet but it was a sleepless night indeed!  Earlier this evening I made my way into a damp and chilly Manhattan and took my seat in the Rose Center for Earth and Science at the Hayden planetarium, The American Museum of Natural History.

It started with an inquiry from a high-tech machining job shop in California. A company was making two small aluminum parts for a major aerospace company and, thanks to a note calling out "Laser Gold per Epner Technology Specification 2011", we naturally got the job to quote.

Wow!   Epner lands in the national press twice in one week!  On the heels of our showing up on the cover of the Mcgraw-Hill publication, Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, a Wall Street Journal writer and I attended the same party.

I recently visited a long time customer: Mini-Circuits, a global operation that is based in Coney Island, that, shamefully, I have not visited for some two years.

The TOW (Tube-launced, Optically-tracked, Wire command data link) anti-tank missile, produced by Hughes Aircraft Company in 1970, became the United States' primary anti-armor weapon system during The Cold War. 

In some 50 years of sales calls, one remarkable day stands alone.  It was a day of incredible contrasts between a morning call at the Electro-Motive works of General Motors, in La Grange, Illinois, where they build diesel-electric locomotives; and an afternoon call, the same day, with the MacDonnell-Douglas plant in St. Louis, where they build F-15 and F-18 fighter jets!

It is called the International Gold Symposium and is held annually in Lima, Peru.  Thanks to my relationship with former head of the World Gold Council in London, Richard Holliday,  my name was put in as a panel member to discuss “Gold as it Affects Humanity.”

I have recently returned from the Eleventh Optatec trade show in Frankfurt, Germany.  It was the third show in as many months and it triggered a pervasive question: Are they worth it?