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| Longmont company does a bang-up job |
| By Donna Davis Daily Times-Call November 10, 1995 |
| Longmont—Give Steve Kajewski a package and he’ll shake it, bake it, rattle it, and roll it. And sometimes he’ll break it. All at the customer’s request, of course. Kajewski manages Storage Technology Corp.’s Advanced Packaging Technology laboratory, a $4.8 million testing facility. StorageTek created the lab three years ago to test whether the computer information storage systems it builds and its packaging can survive shipping. Word got out, and companies started calling, asking if they could put their products and packaging through their paces at StorageTek, Kajewski said. "We were turning away business," he said. Kajewski and boss, Roger A. Morgan, manager of mechanical operations, proposed opening the lab to outside customers. The idea apparently meshed with StorageTek’s plans, announced last month, to make Boulder County’s largest employer profiTABLE by cutting $100 million in costs."StorageTek is trying to reduce its cost of doing business by offering some of our technology to outside businesses," Morgan said. The lab officially opened in mid-October, and StorageTek held an open house Tuesday to show off the 17,000-square-foot Longmont facility. Some 3,000 potential customer nationwide got invitations. "We’re selling fast turnaround," said Kajewski, who hopes to bring in $200,000 in revenue the first year. Customers so far include Gerry baby products, Coors, Exabyte, and Graphic Packaging of Boulder. For $150 an hour, Kajewski and his staff of 15 engineers can design a package, built it from any material the customer requests and test it within hours "because everything is in one place." Engineers compile the testing data and use it to recommend ways to improve the product or its packaging. There is a high-tech torture chamber of more than a dozen machines, each sitting on its own concrete pad surrounded by a rubber border. The concrete pads are set on pillars anchored in bedrock far below the plant. Some of the machines simulate the rigors of travel by ship, plane, rail or truck. Engineers can take a package on a coast-to-coast truck ride in 1.5 hours. "Before we had to put the package on a truck and wait two weeks for it to come back," Morgan said. One machine vibrates packages horizontally, another vertically. Another imitates a human hand dropping a package on its side or edge. Yet another can subject a package to temperatures ranging from 40 degrees below zero to 140 degrees. The Horizontal Impact Testing System recreates what happens when a truck slams into a loading dock or railroad cars bump together at speeds of up to 13 mph. "That’ll do a lot of damage," Kajewski said. "A car bumper is only tested to 10 mph." |
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