The first six months of the business, back in 1962, Don worked in his kitchen to design the transformers. It's not just transformers. Ludlum has another firm cast the shells for the bodies of the units, but more than 80 percent of the rest is done in Sweetwater, Robert said. An extensive machine shop, filled with manual lathes and high-tech units, mills most of the the metal and plastic parts. A computerized unit will take 20 minutes to do a 2-hour manual job.
Circuit boards go from a sheet of metal to a integrated unit of diodes, capacitors and the like.
Harnesses that may have as few as five wires or as many as 5,000 are assembled there. Each labyrinthine amalgamation just exactly fits into the unit for which it is designed. A wrap on the market More than 10,000 radiation detection devices are manufactured there each year, Robert said. The company has 60-plus percent of the portable instrumentation market, which has five major players, he said. The devices are used to measure how much radioactivity exists in or on objects.