There’s an interesting little collection of businesses on Suburban Road in San Luis Obispo.
Readers may be aware of something called a “Tennis Warehouse,” that deals in mostly online sales for sporting goods, or the home of Art’s Cyclery in the same complex, but just down the road is the former home of Earnie Ball Guitars.
In 1985, the company opened a new facility in SLO, one with few to none windows – a company quirk – around their assembly line, which wound through cavernous segmented halls that taper down to a human scale on the west side.
They stayed until 2003 and, eventually, Trust Automation a firm making seemingly everything from ceiling fans to lifting arms for U.S. Army mobile radar arrays, took over the space at 143 Suburban Road.
On August 24, Softec, the Central Coast oriented software and technology association, joined company staffers for an interesting evening touring Trust Automation’s production line and scoping out the challenges they’ve had to overcome. In addition to Softec’s membership, local entrepreneurs, lawyers, SLO City Council candidates, and Central Coast Brew reps – serving beer to offset hors d’ oeuvres – joined them for the evening.
While the engineers at the company don’t actually make weapons as a defense contractor, Trust Automation does produce parts that can’t be found anywhere else in the world, and marketing folks for the company would rather the engineers are, “known for designing innovative systems to meet complex challenges in the semiconductor, defense, industrial automation, green tech and medical industries.”
Two separate tour groups, which, in compliance with Homeland Security protocol, were required to be comprised solely of U.S. Citizens – even though some foreign national engineers living on the Central Coast know more about the tech than other Softec members – went on guided tours of Trust’s 50,000 sq. ft. facility.
Ty Safreno, CEO and Co-Founder of Trust Automation was present to explain some of the other technologies that were protected behind static discharge screens and painted lines on the floor denoting which areas were safe for wandering and behind which to stand as elements of production were explained.
Something locals might be familiar with, huge ceiling fans 24 ft. in diameter that spin virtually silently aside from a slight electronic whine that only the younger members of the group could discern. That’s a Trust product that is mainly used in warehouses and industrial scale barns. One was also deployed to cool down the old SLO Brew location, upstairs on Garden Street in SLO.
In early August, Trust announced their fifth consecutive manufacturing contract for the rugged and high tech \system they developed for Lockheed Martin’s Q-53 Counterfire Target Acquisition Radar. The system is designed to provide soldiers, primarily deployed in Afghanistan, to see incoming fire with “360-degree protection.”
The payload of the radar array is, of course, classified, but to do their jobs, all the guys at Trust need are the specs for weight and timing. They managed to replace a much more cumbersome hydrolytic drive with their signature direct electric drive motors.
Not mentioned in the tour were the drones developed by Zipline, an autonomous robotics company based in San Francisco. The company uses the technology, partially manufactured and supplied by Trust, to deliver medical supplies in Rwanda, such as blood transfusions, antibiotics, vaccines, or anti-venoms.
The drones will send a message to a local health center, and parachute small packages.
Softec’s next tour event will be at PG&E’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, for details go online to: softec.org/events/2016-event-calendar.
