Facility
ASC houses its manufacturing, product development, testing, engineering and sales divisions in a 12,500 sqft manufacturing and office facility in Eugene, Oregon. We have owned the 1 acre property and building since 1998.
The large, open high bay factory is divided into 7 separate areas; Inventory, Fabrication, Finishing, Painting, Custom Shop, Archives and Shipping. Because of limited floor space and the tables needed to be available to setup specialty short run production lines, we operate on a JIT system, where the only work on the floor is quickly moving through its stages of fabrication and finishing and the only product storage area is for finished and packaged products. The only things in the shop that are inventoried are raw stock at one end off the factory and finished product at the other end. We do maintain small inventories of commonly used parts in the assembly area and fabric rolls in finishing.
We have a central dust collection system, central heat for the shop and skylights. Our paint booth is large, 20 by 40 feet and it is divided into two separate paint areas so different projects can be prepped and painted at the same time without concern for overspray. It is also fit with skylights. The entire facility has a new membrane roof.
We are primarily a woodwork and medium density fiberglass fabrication shop. We work with outside vendors for CNC, welding and sheet metal work. Our cutting processes are chosen primarily to keep the amount of airborne fibers to a minimum. This usually means that slower cutting speeds and methods are the ones that work best.
ASC manufacturers everything it supplies to the customers in its factory. We do not consign the manufacturing of our products out of the country. Everything we do is 100% made in Eugene. Most but not all raw materials we use are also made in the USA. However our galvanized hardware cloth, the “exoskeleton” of the TubeTrap is no longer available from US manufacturers and so we have to buy it overseas.
In addition to the factory we have an acoustic test room and an adjacent test equipment room. This room is used for everything imaginable and some. Clear it out and it is a reverb chamber with a smooth RT60 of 2.5 seconds broadband. Load a carpet and speakers and our inventory of house acoustics into the room and we have an audiophile listening room. In 2 hours we can turn it into a recording studio. We also use it for testing mufflers and many other products we are making or developing. We have numerous pieces of audio testing equipment, digital sound management programs, copiers and two plotters, one for research and a large one architectural plan sets and presentation drawings.
We have off street parking for employees and visitors. Because most of our work is out of state and frequently out of the country we actually get very few visitors, although it is not uncommon for a loyal old time TubeTrapper to finally make their journey to the home of TubeTraps. Here they are welcomed, get to meet the people who they have been working with for so long and they get to take a grand shop tour to see where it all comes from. But, if the lab door is locked, we can’t disturb the test that is going on inside.
