Engineered To Lift

[00:00:00] [INTRO MUSIC]

[00:00:15]

**Eric:** So I was at a job site. The customer had what could be obviously a hazardous environment. Walked through all the security and everything and noticed that there's a scissor lift sitting in the environment nothing special about it. It's just a straight up standard scissor lift.

In a hazardous environment? Yeah. Talked to the supervisor- ... and he says, " It's okay. It's got EX tires." that handles the static electricity, but what about the rest of the control system?" Nothing on the motor, nothing enclosing the contactors. This thing is sitting in the open, and you can smell a bit of the gas or fumes or dust in the air.

**Naveen:** Wow.

**Eric:** Yeah, it's a open invitation for a real bad accident.

**Naveen:** Yeah, I'm sure a rental company just gave them, something, here you go.

**Eric:** Oh, sure. They just asked for a scissor lift. They .. probably didn't provide any hazardous environment information, or the rental company probably didn't ask.

This happens every day. Every new application, they just are unaware or they didn't share enough information with the rental [00:01:15] company.

**Naveen:** Welcome to our very first episode, everyone. We're Bailey Cranes. This podcast is called Engineered to Lift, your custom aerial work platforms podcast.

We do the calculations, we read all the regulations, and then we tell you what matters in this podcast. I'm Naveen Vinta, president and CEO of Bailey Specialty Cranes and Aerials. With me is our VP of engineering, Eric Niemi. Hello. So why does this show exist?

It's not like there's not enough podcasts out there for people to listen. Why one more podcast? We are a niche in that sense. We manufacture aerial work platforms that standard equipment, others will not or they can't because of the regulations.

This show is meant for the procurement agent who's been tasked by their manager, "Hey, go and find these." They don't know what they're looking for. They can find that information here. It is for that production floor manager who's been running the same [00:02:15] operations for a long time, who has to go up on productivity but doesn't know how to.

He can come here and then find all the details. And last but not the least, that finance person who we are expecting the purchase order from. Come on, it's already four weeks late, but you want your equipment yesterday. Of course, that happens all the time. The finance person who's carrying the risk of getting it wrong.

Once something goes wrong, that's a huge risk they are undertaking without knowing all of this. Today is episode one, and before we get into anything else, let's start with the company. Eric has been with the company, which is over 20 years from the beginning.

I'll let him tell the story. I joined the party about 20 months ago, this is not about my acquisition journey. I have recorded that on a podcast with Will Smith on Acquiring Minds. We'll link it in the show notes. Now, Eric, could you speak a history of the [00:03:15] company?

**Eric:** Sure, a little bit. I started with the first iteration of the company with the original owner back in 2003, and by 2004, we had designed and delivered the first explosion-proof scissor that had come out of our production.

It was for a major manufacturer. Actually, it was Boeing, and that kicked off the explosion-proof market for us. They saw a need, and they recognized their environment and decided they needed a custom explosion-proof lift that met the requirements for their environment. The standard scissor lift obviously was not enough.

Even an improved was not enough to meet their requirements for spray inside of a hangar on an aircraft. The hazard is there all the time. It's not just a once in a while. It's not there by accident. It's there present.

**Naveen:** I'm sure before 2003 they were using ladders, scaffolding- Yeah, there was-

and what have you.

**Eric:** There was a [00:04:15] lot of scaffold usage, a lot of injuries falls, slips twists. Yeah it's just become a necessity really.

**Naveen:** Yeah. And also an im- Huge productivity killer, I would assume.

**Eric:** Right, and huge productivity improvement by having a mobile piece of equipment that you can just drive into the environment and start painting.

**Naveen:** Yeah. Something the people focused on the ROI won't notice, when you build a scaffolding, it is in place. You can't use that space for anything else. When you have a mobile aerial work platform, you paint the aircraft, you do whatever you're supposed to do, and then it moves out.

The equipment that you're working on moves out, and then the space is yours to do other stuff. That is one of the benefits compared to scaffolding. The zone we operate in is a little bit of a Goldilocks zone because when it comes to explosion-proof equipment, the market size is relatively small for somebody like Oshkosh, Skyjack's Genie, somebody doing this.

And they will not focus their R&D dollars because the market is not large [00:05:15] enough to come to their attention. At the same time, anybody who's got a machine shop, anybody who's been doing mechanic work for even 30 years, they can't just simply enter this market because you need a lot of precision engineering- and all the certifications that go with it.

**Eric:** Yeah, and a lot of the nationally recognized testing laboratories they require ISO 9001 certification to start with. So the basis of your company has to be in you said what you were gonna do, and you documented what the results were so that when you go make a change to a drawing, it's documented.

Those kind of things aren't just for your average everyday machine shop.

**Naveen:** Yeah. So ISO 9001 is a necessary condition, but it's not sufficient. You also need a certification by NRTL. In North America, we go with Factory Mutual.

**Eric:** Yeah. That has been from nearly the beginning. When we first got into it, that was a requirement from a customer, and it's been working out well.

So we've been at this for, like [00:06:15] Naveen said, over 20 years, and no slips, runs or errors. That is the goal. Yeah. Never, no, no incidents.

**Naveen:** When you look at our website, you see all these different aerospace and defense company logos flashing. That did not happen overnight. That did not happen by accident.

The missions that they undergo through are so important, the chance of failure is almost should be a zero. That's why they come to us. When I was looking for a company to acquire, that's what I saw, all these name brands trusting Bailey. They were already there. I inherited that trust. All these companies still trust us. Anytime their equipment breaks down, we're their first call in all these hazardous zones.

**Eric:** Not just hazardous zones too. We do other special lifting equipment, custom boom lifts, custom scissor lifts. We've got applications from art galleries to aerospace satellite manufacturing.

**Naveen:** Yeah, Smithsonian and then Disney. Yeah. [00:07:15] That Disney is like a- That's a- ... like a unique That was a- Can you tell that story once?

**Eric:** Very unique one-off. So I don't know if anybody's seen the, if you've seen the stage show for Maleficent where the- Yeah where she changes into the dragon and suddenly you see there's this dragon coming out of the floor with the actor up in a platform, singing the songs of the show.

In fact, that lift does go underneath the stage. Ah, I see. And it tilts up and it shoots up from the floor to that full height in about 30 seconds. So that's 40 feet off the floor. Yeah. That's quite a distance up.

**Naveen:** Yeah, that, that fun does not happen magically. It is all the calculations and the regulations that results in that kind of fun.

Yes.

**Eric:** And the custom one-off where we were a trusted lift company, we designed to the aerial lift standards and that's what they wanted and we met the requirements for them.

**Naveen:** Yeah.

**Eric:** So it's been there a number of years now.

**Naveen:** In any of [00:08:15] these projects, the customer is very mission focused, mission oriented, and then we do all the heavy lifting, if you want to call it, with all the regulations, calculations, make sure the equipment that we produce exactly meets their specifications. On the approvals that we have, Eric, could you talk about a little bit on the FM approvals that we have for our equipment? What kind of testing that, there's a lot of rigorous testing that goes through before our machines earn the FM yellow level. The little

**Eric:** decal, yeah. Okay, so it starts with your electric motors and controls.

They have to be enclosed in a specialized enclosure rated and tested for the environment, and that testing is the key. So you have to build a number of them of the enclosures. You have to design it around the standards for the environment. Usually NFPA 70 is the major contributor to that, all of the other subsets of regulations and design standards that you need to meet.

So you [00:09:15] have to design it around those standards. You have to build a number of them, two, three, four, depending on how many tests they need to run, and you send it off to the recognized testing lab, and they put it through all of its paces. They put the motor in it and they cook it up and they get it cooking really hot and they find out what the temperature is.

They run through multiple batteries or multiple power sources and they actually put hazardous gas in it and actually blow it up.

**Naveen:** Yeah, explode it, yeah.

**Eric:** Yeah, and actually explosion-proof test it to make sure that the flame does not propagate out of the box into the environment and cause a major catastrophe.

So it's not just a design in accordance with, it's actually tested and approved.

**Naveen:** Yeah, they put it through the ringer, the whole nine yards.

**Eric:** And it is our proprietary information that we've been using for many years now. Not just that the motors and controls, but there's all the other electronics have to [00:10:15] be rated for the environment, be UL listed or Factory Mutual certified.

So those components have already gone through all of this testing, and we incorporate them into our designs for the hazardous environment and offer that to our customers that, hey, we can offer the nice proportional joystick controls- The joysticks, yeah ... as well as some feedback from lights and telling you your battery's low, or, "Hey, you're touching something is in your way." We've got testing or what we call our enhanced PAR system, padded aircraft rails with sensing switches in them. Those are also rated for the environment. So everything's running on intrinsically safe voltage or is enclosed in an enclosure. Even the batteries are enclosed in a special enclosure that you can't strike an arc by accident or even intentionally trying to touch a terminal.

You can't do it,

**Naveen:** Yeah, you can charge these machines inside a hazardous [00:11:15] zone, so one of the things our customers most often do is get an extra battery pack so they can swap out quickly. They can run through 16 to sometimes 24 hours continuous back to back.

**Eric:** Yes. And we've designed battery packs that make that possible for them.

**Naveen:** So while you're getting an explosion-proof aerial lift from us, because we do the engineering and manufacturing all in-house, if you need it to go a couple feet more, if you need this particular extension, "Hey, can you add additional capacity to the lift so we can take our toolbox in there?" The original equipment only rated for 500 pounds if you want to take 600 pounds.

Those are all things we have the capacity to do here at our facility.

**Eric:** That is correct. We've built a number of custom machines, and they're still out there. Some of them are well more than 10 years old, and they're still functioning. They're still in operation. We're making parts and- Yeah

selling them parts.

**Naveen:** So Lockheed Martin reached out. They want to refurbish one of their 100-foot clean room machines probably [00:12:15] sometime in this or the early part of next year.

**Eric:** Yep, in sometime this fall is what I understand, and those have been out there for, oh, God, the last one we shipped was, like, 2014, 2015, so it's more than 10 years that it's been out.

**Naveen:** Recently we've also gotten some interest from data centers. One of the major players in the data center market, they're trying to construct data centers. We all know they want all these data centers constructed yesterday. This company is trying to put panels that were traditionally used outdoors on the buildings.

They're using the same panels indoors, so they can have the heavy equipment come when the building is constructed. They came to our facility, they look at our compact handlers, we're working to give them exactly what they want so they can build these data centers really quickly.

So this is gonna be improving their productivity by at least three to fourfold.

**Eric:** If you can picture a data center, you've got all the wires and [00:13:15] cables, all the routings for the passageways for the wires, as well as fire suppression systems, so- Yeah ... The building can get pretty crowded.

And we've dis- There's not a

**Naveen:** lot of maneuverability.

**Eric:** No. And we've been working on our Omni Motion Drive system for a number of years, and we have it tuned down so that we can operate in that environment, along with a panel lifter capable of lifting their panels and putting them in place.

So we're heavily into production on that right now.

**Naveen:** We've been doing this for 20 years. We're out in the Midwest. We like what we do, but also understand that we are also implementing a lot of artificial intelligence incorporation into our back office. Some of engineers are trying to incorporate some of the artificial intelligence features in SOLIDWORKS, AutoCAD, to see how we can do things more efficiently.

And also because of our expertise recently, we've got inquiries from two robotic companies.

**Eric:** Yeah, It's interesting. They want to do spraying of solutions [00:14:15] onto aircraft, and they have a robot that is capable of watching and spraying it on an even surface onto the aircraft. The issue is: How do they get it up to the height above the aircraft- Yeah.

Exactly ... where they need to reach? And how do you do that precisely without a person in the platform? It's gonna be interesting to see how that unfolds, but we're up to the challenge here.

**Naveen:** They have their robot. They need somebody to lift it. And then our name says Engineered Access and Lifting, if you haven't noticed that on the back wall here.

**Eric:** Yeah we're starting to get more traction into different markets. The robotics market is one that's starting to pick up.

**Naveen:** So painting aircraft, I recently saw some of the news article. Instead of washing planes using water and traditionally all of that, there's a different way to wash these airplanes.

They were looking at the robotics company we talked to. They're also looking at some of those applications. Yeah. Washing aircraft and other things.

**Eric:** Yeah it's not just a simple de-icing operation. Yeah. It's much [00:15:15] more complex now. They can't use a lot of solution. They need to keep it efficient, and it's not just about getting the ice off the plane.

It's another application where they're prepping for paint, they're finishing the painting, or they're putting some kind of substance on the aircraft that's special for it. So it's a lot more precise unique environment for sure.

**Naveen:** So we have our explosion-proof aerial work platforms. The clean room versions are the same. We have our compact handlers that can go through a standard doorway, and then we have our custom engineered lift. We do it from the ground up. We work with the engineers and the client's team.

We finalize on the requirements. We do the preliminary design, detail design. We make a detailed project plan, go through all of that, and manufacture here in-house. One of the things with doing manufacturing and engineering both under the same roof, the feedback loops are very immediate and quick. If somebody on the floor has a question, they can come to the [00:16:15] engineering and then ask a question.

I assume same thing with your team, Eric?

**Eric:** Yep. We're all highly skilled people in a niche market, so we're- Yeah ... we're definitely here to support our team. Education is one big part of what I do. So anything with hazardous environment, I'm happy to share the information with our internal team as well as you, our viewers.

Yeah. That hey, you've got a question on, "Hey, can you build a piece of equipment for our environment?" Give us a call.

**Naveen:** Yeah, please reach out. That's why we're here. You can find all our details on our website and LinkedIn all over. You can send any specific queries you don't want to discuss publicly to podcasts@baileycranes.com.

We'll be happy to get on a one-on-one consultation with you. Not everything will result in a engagement or a fee. We are happy to share the knowledge and then make sure you avoid any catastrophe or you're not undertaking any risk that you don't understand. We are here to help you.

**Eric:** Correct.

**Naveen:** All right, that's our show.

Now back to the fun. We'll be back in two [00:17:15] weeks. So we will do this every other week. Upcoming is Memorial Day. Thank you for all the service members out there. With that, we'll see you back in two weeks.

**Eric:** Have a good one. Thanks.

[00:17:22] [OUTRO MUSIC]