It has been an interesting year. Many would take that as a gross understatement, but with everything else aside, it has been an exciting year at United Equipment Accessories (UEA).

We began construction work on consolidating all slip ring assembly processes under one roof well over a year ago, following years of discussions. Because of the continuing growth of our electrical slip ring product line and the addition of an also quickly growing rotary union product line, we are rapidly and continually filling our floorspace and needed to expand our floor space.

The current expansion is the largest in UEA history, growing our facility by 29,000 square feet. This, however, was not a conventional expansion. We needed to not disturb production in the area that was being expanded, and additionally, that area of the building would be replaced entirely with the new one.

This unconventional plan required several stages of construction.  First, the majority of the roof was constructed over the new floorspace and overtop the existing building. Once that new floorspace was completed to the point it was usable, departments were relocated, sometimes temporarily, to open up the old building to be deconstructed from under the new building. Then all the new infrastructure could be implemented and prepared for the next migration of people and equipment. One of the most extensive parts of the migrations was to bring the wind turbine slip ring assembly line to the new space.  This move consolidated all slip ring assembly to one building and opened up the old space to expand our cleanroom assembly area of the hydraulic swivel line.

We are nearing the project's final phases, and life at UEA is returning to normal. We want to spotlight one of the key players during this project, Jonathan Hempel. Jonathan has been the liaison between the UEA team, the general contractor, and most of the subcontractors. He is often scrambling to keep up with all the numerous details and problems that occur on a project of this magnitude.

We hope that UEA's new expansion will help us better serve all our customers with additional production space for our slip ring and rotary union product lines.

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