Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1540425
OCTOBER 2025 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 89 Corp., a beverage dispenser, and National Cash Register (NCR), they successfully developed and installed the system throughout the industry, becom- ing particularly popular with bowling alleys. This was a precursor to the "micro-dosing" medication dis- pensing technology and Coca-Cola's Freestyle sys- tems, both of which Dad and I would be intimately involved in later in our careers. Electro-Tek was building all of EM's circuit boards, and while it was a major customer, EM's cash flow problems greatly affected Electro-Tek's receivables. Probably heavily influenced by the amount of money EM owed, the idea was floated that it might make sense to pur- chase the highly profitable Electro-Tek to provide customers a one-stop shop for PCBs and assem- bly. Jerry Klein wanted to retire again, so after sev- eral months of negotiations, the company was sold. The new entity's leadership team, which basi- cally comprised Dad and Pete, wanted Electro-Tek in a more professional facility, so Dad found a com- pany completing construction of a multi-bay facility on 10th Street, south of Layton Avenue in Milwau- kee, that allowed him to customize the interior of two bays to accommodate PCB manufacturing (Figure 2). Everyone agreed it made sense to transfer the Electro-Tek assembly business to EM, which gave it a ready-made PCB customer base needing assembly services, particularly Kohler. As Electro-Tek grew, it brought in more PCB talent and equipment. It was in this facility that we had our first CNC equipment, an Excellon OPIC programmer and Mark IV drill/router. I remember when the plant manager, who had come from the nearby Delco PCB operation, said, "Steve, come check this out!" In addition to the single-station bottom drills, we had a "quad drill," which had four spindles manually controlled by an operator following a "roadmap" path in a manually bottom-drilled template. The operator would lower a stylus into a template hole and pull a trigger to initi- ate the drilling of a single hole in the four stacks of panels. The quad drill and the Excellon both had four stations, each with a spindle that would drill a stack of one to three panels. I saw the juxtaposition of the Excellon drilling 20 cycles in the time it took the quad drill to cycle once (240 holes vs. 12 in three-panel stacks). This was the first of many technology game- changers I was fortunate to be part of over the years. We then published our first four-page brochure fea- turing many of our employees hard at work. Adding Design to the Mix A few major events then happened that would change the landscape of the electronics indus- try, and the careers of our family. First, EM wanted to create a separate operation for its electron- ics assembly work and decided on a very creative name: Electronic Assembly Corp. (EAC), which folded in EM. Pete's vision was always to offer a complete cradle-to-grave solution to customers for product development, design, and manufacture of electronic and electromechanical products, which checked off two of the three services. There was T H E R I G H T A P P ROAC H F i g u re 2 : T h e s e c o n d E l e ct ro -Te k fa c i l i t y at 4 824 S o u t h 1 0 t h S t re et , M i l wa u ke e, W i s c o n s i n . ▼