After
the Maiden Voyage
I approached them about setting up a manufacturing company of their own to produce the products. I would set up the facility and run the manufacturing end of it for them.... they accepted it and we began heading in that direction. It took a couple of years to get it to the point where it was just starting to make sense and everybody and his brother jumped into the business. It became a whore's market and we decided to shift to the Industrial Air Cleaner business... bigger systems... less hassle with bar owners.
On the way back to the plant, I had an idea of combining our clean, re-circulated air with dehumidification. I set about designing a system to use the combination to pass large volumes of air across the product and dry the paint.
No not really, but now with 20 some employees doing the grunt work, I'm sometimes bored and think about the old days.... thus the Reasoner Website. Speaking of Websites..... remember back 300 pages ago about the Color Computer and the kids? Back in '94 since the kids are now wizards with these things (I think we had about 15 different machines by then).... I decided to start putting websites together for people and to get a server of our own.... ya know... for something to do. I We don't have a lot of customers. Currently we host about 100 domains containing some 14,000 pages of published information.... most of which I have done the hard way...with Notepad. We partnered with a small Website Marketing and Sales Company last year called Kamarak which has been good for our side line company and have even brought us to a level of moderate profitability. Or at least it's not out of pocket any more. Sherry's dedication to helping both our companies prosper has made this a wonderful experience.... and it continues to grow.
Billy now has his own Computer Consulting / Service business and is also the Information Manager for Optimum Air. He holds a BS in Computer Science from SUNY Utica. He works for Horizonweb.com when needed... which is a lot of the time. I can't handle the tecky part. Chad started college at Alfred State this August to pursue a degree in Computer Engineering Technology. He has grown up at the server and is our long distance gear-head... right now anyway. He does whatever he needs to do via modem. That's our lives.... since September 26, 1973.... so far. Sorry it's so long... but it's good therapy. 8^) Bill BBay(AT)BBay(DOT)com
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Two days after returning
home I took a job designing hydraulic and pneumatic control systems (utilizing my
EXTENSIVE Naval Training in these fields... all right...I Bull Shitted my way into it....
and then learned how to do it at the library) for a local Fluid Power/ Power Transmission
Distributor. The next 10 years or so I was involved in the Sales and Management end of
Industrial Sales.
Our second Son Chad was born in 1980 requiring a shift in
my career goals.... like making some money, and went into my own business repairing of all
things auto and truck radiators in the two car garage of my house. About a year and a half
of people, usually drunk, banging on my door at 2:00AM to fix their radiators convinced me
to turn the business over to my father for a dollar. He ran it another couple of years
until his health failed and he gave it up.
Most of the 80's found me in various metal fabrication engineering jobs.
Designing and building all kinds of systems for various industries. Pulp and Paper,
Wastewater Treatment, Heavy Industrial Processes, telecommunications, Sub-Contract
Manufacturing, Tank Fabrications, ASME Pressure Vessels, and almost anything that was made
of steel, stainless or aluminum.
In 1980 I also purchased my first computer... a Radio Shack
Color Computer 16K!.... generally, I thought, "This is going to be the
future".... TADA! Good guess. So now the two boys, one 8 and the other 1-1/2 now are
going to town figuring out Basic programming and making the machine do what they want it
to do..... more about that later.
The dawn of the '90's found me itchy again ready
to do something else... I was bored. I got to know one of my employer's customers pretty
well. They were two brothers who sold the commercial air cleaners which they contracted
with us to design and manufacture for them.
We were beginning
to develop a nice industrial customer base locally with Carrier, General Electric and a
few others in the North East. During one of our visits to Carrier during the summer, we
were told that one of the biggest problems they faced in manufacturing large chillers was
the humid days of summer. The waterbased paint they used took forever to dry and it was
holding up production. They had a few of our booth size capture systems for Phos Prep
spray washing which cleaned the air and re-circulated clean air back into the plant and
they were working great. I told them I had some ideas and left without a clue as to how to
solve the problem.
After making some patent disclosures we built a prototype,
did some testing, and it worked. The customer bought about 21 systems ... WAY over a
million's worth.... and other customers started to adopt the technology. We currently have
about 150 systems out there scattered through out the US and are working on projects in
Canada, Mexico, England, Australia, France,..... and of course here in the states. The
automotive industry is just now taking a hard look at it and some have ordered lab units
for testing. Our company, 
