Posted by
Tom Trisco on Mon, Feb 20, 2012 @ 08:45 AM
Chuck Yanke is taking a breather from writing about the Luge Team and is passing the torch for the blog back to me. I’ve enjoyed reading his postings, not just because I got a couple of months off, but because I learned more about a subject I thought I already knew pretty well.
Not the case.
I have met the Luge athletes Vulcan has sponsored. I’ve seen first-hand how the employees, me included, get charged up hearing stories of their training, competitions, triumphs and setbacks. These are all themes we know in business. We get inspired when they exhibit the same spirit in their world. The sliders make their runs, the performance time is what it is, and they either win or they don’t.
But that’s all on the surface.
What I didn’t have insight into, but maybe should have, was the degree to which engineering advances can play a role in competitive outcomes. The fact is this is exactly what happens every day for us on the job. When the engineers at Vulcan GMS get an opportunity to work with customers, typically our engineers have a fast and positive impact on the course of new product development and product upgrade efforts.
Let’s take the subject of lead shielding for radiation protection products. This is an activity that is at the core of our business. To do our job well, we have busy engineering, quality and customer-service departments that have to work closely together. We need to be highly competitive at the work we do so our customers can build on our excellence to enhance their own competitiveness.
In this way, the people in our company work like the USA Luge Team’s corporate sponsors. We all find areas within our own zones of expertise to do good for the team. That means working together as engineers, quality professionals and problem solvers to give the team the finest possible equipment to use.
Personally, I didn’t have a perspective on just how much work was going into the effort to support our team. With the next Winter Olympics only two years away, and a team of up-and-coming sliders dedicated to perfecting their skills, there is a window of opportunity for improving equipment, performance measurement tools and finding new designs, new materials and new production techniques that can make a difference.
Supporting the Luge Team is one way Vulcan exercises its commitment to continuous improvement. What we learn about lead manufacturing, lead processes and making our lead products better, enables us to help the Luge Team. And the act of helping them gives us a feed-back loop to spread production improvements throughout our shop to serve customers better.
Our core business is developing lead and non-lead radiation protection materials and products. These products shield people from x-rays: in medical devices, in security systems for airports, seaports and buildings, and in scientific applications where radiation shielding systems are needed.
Watching Vulcan’s Luge support team in action is one more way to sharpen our understanding of how important it is to work together. Customers need x-ray shielding lead products that are of completely reliable quality, delivered in an ever-faster time frame, and characterized by optimal balance of improvement and affordability.
Emulating the Luge Team, in their focus on winning, shows us the discipline that will help the Team fulfill its quest—maybe in Sochi, Russia in two years—to bring home a gold medal.
That same discipline also helps us satisfy our customers in a way that contributes to their success, setting the stage for all of us to strengthen our businesses and prosper.
Every time we go to a race, or to Lake Placid, NY, to visit the team’s training facility, I am impressed with dedication of the athletes to continuous improvement. They are never satisfied with good enough. They realize this is a world defined by competition and that there is always someone in another country trying to outperform your best effort. Sure sounds a lot like the business world we compete in every day. In that world you either improve or you lose ground. You can always feel the hot breath of the competition on the back of your neck. This fact of life, and the degree to which the sliders understand their competitive environment, is a source of inspiration to me.
The other thing that really impresses me is these young men and women make a superhuman effort purely for the love of the sport. When they retire there is no million-dollar contract waiting for them. There is no pro circuit for them to join and make a fortune. When they are done sliding, they have to complete their educations and get a job like the rest of us. When you are training to be an Olympic athlete it’s a fulltime job. I mean seven days a week, year around. It does not leave time to have a job to earn money. The athletes are helped by the USLA (United States Luge Association), but they can by no means cover all their expense, especially if they are going to night school to get a degree.
In response to this reality, the USLA developed the “Adopt an Athlete” program. This program provides an opportunity for businesses and individuals to donate to an individual athlete thru the USLA to help offset some of the sliders’ educational expenses.
In 1995, Vulcan GMS adopted two athletes, Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin. Each year we would invite them come out and meet all our employees. For us, this was a time to celebrate their efforts. We would have a big party and Mark and Brian would tell us about the sport of luge and show video of the previous year’s races. It has been great fun watching these two young men grow up and succeed. “Adopt an Athlete” is one of most beneficial things a business can do.
Mark and Brian formed a new doubles team. A doubles team means there are two people on the sled. They lay on their backs, one on top of the other. The man on the bottom steers and the one on the top sees were they are going and tells the guy underneath him what to do. As you might imagine, the need for coordination is tremendous when you are going down an icy track at 90 mile an hour.
In the early days, Brian and Mark crashed a lot. But over time they got better and better, faster and faster. Back then, they had less income than church mice. And due to the difficulty mastering the sport, they were slow to make the senior team. However, Mark and Brian were convinced they could make the team if they had a fair chance.
The team offered them a slot in a race in Germany. The catch: They had to get there on their own. They pooled all the money they had to buy two one-way tickets to Germany. There was no financial safety net for them. Nonetheless, they were convinced they would make the team. W-e-l-l, that’s dedication; that’s determination!
As the luge history book shows, they were the number one US sled at that race and were put on the team. This kind of commitment to a goal is what we think characterizes the team at our company—Vulcan GMS. I could see a lot of us in them and I try to use the competitive spirit of the USA Luge Team as a mirror for us to recognize and develop the same spirit within ourselves.
Fast forward to the Olympic games in Nagano Japan. Mark and Brian were the first American athletes in history to win an Olympic Medal in Luge. They received the Bronze Medal, beating out all but two other nations to stand in the limelight. Never before had any luge athlete made it to the podium at the Olympics. It was a first for America and we all glowed with pride. One more time, it confirmed for me what commitment and a single-minded focus can do. Today Mark and Brian are retired. Brian is going to school in California and Mark is the new coach of the entire USA Luge Team.
Learn more at www.usaluge.org. and sign up to receive news about our team’s accomplishments.
Luge is one of the most exciting sports at the Winter Olympics most exciting sports. Keep up with your team.
You can also find out more about Vulcan at www.vulcangms.com
The USA Luge Team had a fantastic January. The sliders at the Youth Olympic Games in Igls, Austria, took a Gold Medal in the team relay event on January 17—the USA Luge Team’s first Gold Medal in an Olympic-type event—and only a few days later, on January 22, the team of Erin Hamlin in women’s singles and Chris Mazdzer in men’s singles, joined by the doubles sled of Christian Niccum and Jayson Terdiman, captured a Silver Medal at the World Cup competition in Winterberg, Germany.
Way to go, Team!
Excitement is high among long-term fans and the sport is gaining more attention among Americans because of the outstanding performance of our young athletes. As readers of my blog series know, the equipment the sliders use to compete needs to be the best we can make it, so the natural athletic talent of our sliders is aided to the maximum extent possible by the gear they use to compete.
We have spoken about the need to make a luge run at the ideal weight, and how Vulcan supplies the team lead weights for use in sleds and body suits. Yet not everything the sliders use aims in the direction of heaviness. For example, helmets, which are the only piece of safety equipment the sliders use. The helmet is as light as we can make it and for good reason.
When a slider shoots into a turn, he or she can be pulling 3 G’s of force. Since the sliders must hold their heads up the entire time during the run to see where they are going, you can image how much pressure is exerted on their head and neck. Every extra ounce of helmet weight in these circumstances is an unwelcome negative factor, so designers have created helmets that feel like they have no weight at all.
The sliders’ helmets are made by a company named UVEX. The helmets that company supplies have a clear face shield and are made of Kevlar, so they are both strong and extremely light in weight. Keeping the helmet as light as possible is another way the USA Luge Team makes sure it is “engineering in performance” for every piece of equipment it uses.
The sliders also wear special shoes, sometimes called “booties,” and they keep their feet pointed forward during a run. That’s because the toe of each bootie is designed to be highly aerodynamic. Result: the design helps slice through air resistance for maximum speed.
The last piece of equipment I’ll talk about in this blog are the gloves. Typically, gloves are made of leather and have small spikes sticking out at the fingertips. At the beginning of a run, sliders use these spikes to claw their way to the fastest possible speed right out of the starting gate.
These spikes are about .200 inches long—close to a quarter- inch. They are very sharp and so designed to enable the athlete to really dig into the ice at the start of the run. This piece of equipment gives sliders another way to impact the speed of their overall run.
What I find most interesting is how all these pieces come together to facilitate a fast, precise run. As I have said before, a slider can win or lose a race by one thousandths of a second.
Fortunately, in the business world our competitive timing isn’t quite that demanding. Nonetheless, we have to run fast and run flawlessly to satisfy customers. That’s why our entire company finds such inspiration in watching the USA Luge Team compete, studying their attention to detail, and learning from their relentless dedication to excellence.
Read more about this at www.usaluge.org. Sign up to receive news and follow the team.
Luge is one of the Winter Olympics’ most exciting sports. It is certainly one of the most competitive and thrilling to watch. Keep up with your team.
Also, find out more about the Vulcan engineering capabilities we draw on to help our team at www.vulcangms.com
As I have said before a “slider” can win or lose a race by .001 sec. That’s why precision equipment that achieves maximum speed is the key to winning. I appreciate the speed factor because it’s the same factor that makes us successful in our business. Doing your job excellently at the fastest possible pace is a basic measure of effectiveness in any endeavor.
In my last two posts I described how our engineering resources have served the USA Luge Team. We talked about (1) measuring the mirror image of the blade structure, and (2) contouring the surface area of the blades. These two areas are of paramount importance.
But there is more to the blades than mirror-imaging and contouring, so let me add a bit more information to your understanding about how the blades relate to performance.
The blades are typically a laminate of two different kinds of steel welded together. The part of the blade that makes contact with the ice is made from special steel. Much testing has been done and we’ve discovered that not all steels slide equally. Some alloys are slipperier than others.
These are the steels we want for our blades!
Also, blade design is important. The fastest sleds come equipped with blades that are slightly bowed, front to back, so they can tip back and forth like a rocking chair. Sliders use this “rock-ability” to manoeuver the sled into advantageous positions when steering throughout the run.
The runners are a key part of sled design. Also, called kuffins, the runners are the curved parts you can see sticking out of the front of the sled. This is where the athlete positions his or her feet. The runners extend back under the pod and attach to the bridges.
At this point, you should begin to have a picture in your mind of how all these pieces come together. The design that can optimize the integrated working of all of the pieces of the sled’s configuration will enable the most precise, highly controlled run—the run that gives the slider the best chance to win.
Lastly, to insure top performance, the sled is weighed to make sure it achieves the desired heaviness. If it weighs in too light, precision lead weights of the type Vulcan supplies to the team are permanently attached to the sled to bring it up to ideal run weight.
Now the slider is ready for the run. When he or she is lying in the sled and going down the track, steering is accomplished with very subtle moves. For example, to turn the sled to the right, the slider presses the left leg against the upwardly curved left runner. Simultaneously, pressure is applied in a downward direction with the right shoulder. Only the slightest movement is needed, barely more than visualizing these movements, to turn a sled hurtling along at 80 miles per hour in down the right path.
Continuously improving our sled technology, through design innovations and material selection, is of vital importance to the USA Luge Team. One of the young sliders Vulcan sponsors, Emily Sweeney of Suffield, Connecticut, took 14th place in the singles qualification at a Nations Cup event in Winterberg, Germany, on January 20, 2012. Read more about this at www.usaluge.org. You can sign up to receive news and keep up with our teams accomplishments.
Luge is one of the Winter Olympics’ most exciting sports. It is certainly one of the most competitive and thrilling to follow. Keep up with your team.
Also, find out more about Vulcan’s engineering capabilities at www.vulcangms.com
Because Luge is a sport that measures speed down to thousandths-of-a-second increments, no detail that affects speed goes unexamined.
Last week we talked about the importance of design engineering to make sure the blades remain mirror images of each other during the course of a luge run. The mirror-imaging capability of the blades plays a critical role in achieving the maximum speed for the sled. It is one of the Holy Grails of sled design.
However, other factors also impact performance and must be accommodated. A second Holy Grail of sled design is the proper contouring of the business part of the blade—the part where the blade meets the ice. The design engineer’s challenge is to contour, or round out, the bottom of the blades. The design intent is to optimize the sled’s ability to go through curves with the least amount of friction. Here again, sliders want a mirror-image in the contouring of the blade edge, as well as between the entire alignment of the two blades.
During the course of a luge run, the contact surface of the blades shifts from the bottom of the blade at the start, to the sides of the blade as it dashes up the side of the curved track to maneuver through the twists and turns in the run. The USA Luge Team won the Gold Medal in team relay at the Youth Olympic Games with a 0.4 second margin over the Silver Medal winners. Attention to details in sled design played a role in this victory.
Consider this detail: Over the course of the run, no matter what angle the sled is at relative to the bottom of the luge track, the curvature of the blade insures that the part of the blade in contact with the ice produces no drag due to variances in the contouring that might slow the sled’s speed. Proper contouring along the entire length of the blade eliminates avoidable drag, thus contributing to greater speed. A half second slower and the USA Luge Team would not have captured its first Gold Medal.
The special device we developed with help from our friends at Universal Tool allows the USA Luge Team to measure the angle of each blades contour individually, while also enabling adjustments to the contour of both blades simultaneously during the honing step.
So now, through these last two posts, you have gained an appreciation of how much science and engineering goes into sled design and testing and adjustment during the course of a luge season.
We like to think our contributions helped the USA Luge Team capture its first Gold Medal in team relay at an Olympic type event—the Youth Olympic Games just concluded in Igls, Austria. In the photo above, left to right, are men’s doubles winners Pat Edmunds and Ty Andersen, men’s singles winner Tucker West and women’s singles winner Summer Britcher. Congratulations, the future of the USA Luge Team looks great with outstanding young performers like these coming up the ranks.
Our goal is to have our “Engineering in Performance” efforts pay dividends for the USA Luge Team in Sochi, Russia, in 2014, the next Winter Olympics. Follow the progress of the team at www.usaluge.com
Read more about Vulcan’s engineering resources at www.vulcangms.com
Once a slider arrives at the maximum weight allowed, the next hurdle in winning luge competitions is getting down the track faster than everyone else. The question is: What makes a sled slide down a steep luge track faster? The answer involves some serious engineering.
The competitive factors come in two parts. The first, which we’ll talk about in this post, is parallelism. To maximize speeds, the blades of the sled need to be mirror images of each other. But parallelism is not exactly the correct term to use, because the pod of the sled, being made of fiberglass, is flexible. So perfect parallelism is never quite achieved—or even desirable—during a luge run.
That’s because the center line of the sled, the hypothetical mid-point between the blades, is shifting constantly. The center line moves as the slider leans his or her body weight in one direction or another, applying pressure to the blades with the feet, to steer the sled throughout the course of the run.
Universal Tool in Milwaukee, one of our suppliers, helped us to develop a fixture that digitally measures the distance between the blades. The measuring device plots the distance, at any given point along a blade, from its opposite blade as stress is applied to subtly alter the “spread” between the blades. The slider, in the quest for fastest descent path, is constantly adjusting the blades. And, ideally, the sled’s design facilitates keeping a “mirror image” of the blades as nearly perfectly as possible, maximizing the speed of descent.
Think of the maneuver in skiing called “snow plowing.” That’s an action that points the tips of the skis together at the front and widens the span between the backs of the skis to the widest possible point. This action serves to slow down and eventual stop the descent of the skier.
A slider wants to do exactly the opposite of this, though in a highly controlled way. The slider wants the alignment of the blades of the luge sled to be just a small fraction more open at the front to avoid entirely any “snow plow” effect.
This measuring device, shown in the photo above, is now being used by the USA Luge Team to guide refinements to sled design. It’s an example of how Vulcan strives to help the USA Luge team meet its goal of “engineering in performance” for the team’s key piece of equipment. Next week, we’ll talk about the importance of properly contouring the blades.
Visit our website to learn more about Vulcan’s engineering capability. www.vulcangms.com
When we set out to make lead weights for the Luge team, Vulcan’s strategy was to stop hand-cutting weights and start using power equipment. Very quickly, we made balance weights that were more consistent in shape and precise in weight. At first, our goal was simply to produce lead products that weighed exactly one ounce.
By trial and error, we explored different methods to achieve this weight, as well as a consistent and repeatable size. Over time, we engineered a lead manufacturing process that could accurately produce weights that were 1in. x 1in. x 0.25in., give or take a couple thousandths of an inch, and weighed precisely one ounce.
To make weights that met our target, we needed a highly predictable lead manufacturing process. Our preferred method involved two steps. First, we extruded a “ribbon” of lead. In this manufacturing approach, the lead extrusion process determines the width and thickness of the ribbon when pressure pushes the alloy thru a small opening. Just picture yourself squeezing a toothpaste tube: you are extruding a ribbon of toothpaste. This manufacturing strategy resulted in a lead product that was one inch wide and almost the desired height—a quarter of an inch. We achieved this shape with step two, using a set of hardened dies on our 50-ton stamping press. The lead weights that emerged from the stamping operation met our size goal of 1in. x 1in. x 0.25in and our weight goal of exactly one ounce.
The lead processes we used in the early days of our support for the USA Luge Team were relatively fast and resulted in a lead stamping of consistent weight and size. However, we knew we had not, from a manufacturing point of view, achieved the most elegant solution. It was still too labor intensive and time consuming. So we kept trying. Manufacturing people are never happy till the optimal solution is found.
A year or so later, after we had honed our expertise at making lead castings with very tight tolerances, we felt we were on the brink of the optimal solution for luge weights. The beauty of die-casting is that, when the molten lead is injected into the steel die, it solidifies almost instantly. A finished lead weight can be popped out, literally in seconds, significantly reducing labor. We tested our idea, it worked, and we then ordered special dies just for luge weights. These dies have been preforming fantastically ever since and we can now make a luge weight faster than a slider can go down a luge track.
Next week, we will take a look at sleds.
Between now and then, check out www.usaluge.org to meet some of the winners of recent luging competitions.
Success at luging is all about speed and precision. It has always fascinated me how even a slight change in speed can have a wonderful effect on performance—or cause a train wreck. This is true in business as well as in luging. Achieving peak performance calls for a delicate balancing act and in luge we have been helping to keep our athletes moving along that tightrope as fast as possible.
As I reported previously, there are rules regulating how much extra weight a slider can carry. The Federation Internationale de Luge de Course (http://www.fil-luge.org) has a thick book establishing the rules for every aspect of the sport. Included is a large section for calculating the extra weight men, women, and doubles teams can put on in the form of lead weights. Each group must meet different weight requirements. These rules are absolutely critical, because this is a sport where the difference between 1st and 5th place can be less than five thousandths of a second. This is why every slider wants to carry the maximum weight allowed.
The answer to this challenge is lead. 20 years ago it was common for people to go to their local hardware store and buy a sheet of lead, which they often used for a shower pan that would keep water from leaking down and rotting the wood under their shower. Back then, the USA Luge Team would also buy sheets of lead and, with a scissors and a hand saw, cut up small pieces to sew into their weight vests and leggings. Still, it was difficult to achieve exact weights and desired shapes starting with lead sheet. This is a serious uncertainty, because the penalty for showing up at even slightly over the weight limit is immediate disqualification.
At this stage we began looking for ways to design and engineer lead weights that would be efficient for us to produce and productive for the team to use. Next week I’ll tell you how we all attacked balancing the need for precision and the need for speed.
While you are waiting, pay a visit to www.usaluge.org and get the latest info about recent competitions and achievements.
One afternoon in 1992, my wife Sandy and I had the TV tuned to the Winter Olympics being held in Albertville, France. We found it riveting to watch young athletes sliding down an icy track, feet first, at speeds exceeding 90 miles per hour. This was our introduction to luging and we felt the excitement. We later discovered it is the fastest winter sport—the only one timed in thousandths-of-a-second increments.
We followed the USA Luge Team closely. Back then, we were not a strong competitor and there was little awareness of the sport in the States. Between competitions, as the athletes talked about their equipment, one item that caught my attention was lead weights. Luging is all about sliding downhill. Gravity is your friend. The heavier you are, the faster you go. All “sliders” [as luge athletes call themselves] want to weigh in at the legal limit to take full advantage of gravity.
Luge has a lot of rules about wearing lead. The rules help to level the playing field between a 125-pound slider versus a 250-pound slider. As I was running a very small company back in 1992, I identified with the underdog position of the USA Luge Team: I know how you have to move faster and try harder when competing.
Vulcan was so small back then we did not have a marketing budget. But we had lead. We had the means to provide the team with some heavyweight support. It occurred to me that a great way to let the world know we existed was to give lead weights to sliders. When the team got back from France I called and spoke to Dymtre Feld. I explained who I was and offered to donate balance weights to the entire team. The US luge team was thrilled with my offer. What slider wouldn’t want free lead!
That was the start of the 19-year relationship between the USA Luge Team and Vulcan. Today, we have the distinction of being the oldest supplier and supporter of the team.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about luge weights themselves and how “engineering in performance” guided our efforts to help the team compete more effectively.
Meanwhile, learn more about the inspirational USA Luge Team at: http://usaluge.org/, and see a video of me speaking about our support of the USA Luge Team (see video).
Posted by
Tom Trisco on Mon, Dec 05, 2011 @ 07:37 AM
Successfully exploring the universe is not a lead pipe cinch and working for a company with the word “solutions” in its name is a great way to learn the value of speaking cautiously until exciting developments can be proved to translate into solid solutions.
As the Large Hadron Collider continues on its shake-down launch, bugs, glitches and oversights large and small come to the surface. Currently the LHC is conducting experiments at half-power. While this approach is not supplying answers about the fundamental questions of physics as fast as the world would like, the LHC team is making progress.
The good news bodes well for all of us. One of the goals of CERN is “to make the results of our work as widely known and used as possible.” That goal covers not just physics, but all the knowledge generated by the European-based researchers.
The idea is that basic research drives innovation, so CERN encourages its people to transfer the technology and knowledge they acquire to all potential users.
In a couple of years, the LHC will be working at full power and the spigot of information can open wider. I think the world will benefit from this future stream of useful technology and I hope Vulcan continues to play a role in the LHC’s success.
Now it’s time to end our series of posts on the LHC and shift to a different arena of human activity—Vulcan’s long support for the USA Luge team. The author of this series will be Vulcan GMS’s founder, Chuck Yanke, who has long been a supporter and sponsor of the USA Luge Team.
Tune in next week for the beginning of an interesting series.
In the interim, take a moment to visit our website and learn more about all the ways Vulcan GMS uses lead products to heal, detect, protect, explore the origin of the universe and even find ways to help the USA Luge team compete more effectively: www.vulcangms.com
See top right to get our blog postings as they are published. We welcome your comments.