2 weeks Ago
The modest workshop for Greg Ames’ high-tech sensor business, Blue Line Engineering, appears as a dot on the map of downtown Colorado Springs, a place where the storylines of celestial bodies and humanity’s workings intersect. Behind office buildings’ shadows, where dead-end streets and train tracks meet, the old 4,800-square-foot brick AT&SF Freight House serves as Blue Line’s laboratory, test site, manufacturing facility and distribution center. There, the company’s 15-person team designs and creates precision sensors for telescopes and satellites, as well as for aircraft and spacecraft used by agencies and companies such as NASA, Lockheed Martin and the federal government.
Ames started the company in 1994 in what used to be a chicken coop and coal bin for an 1896 carriage home. Blue Line Engineering was awarded by Colorado Manufacturing Awards 2023 Manufacturer of the Year. Despite accolades, Ames, like his workshop, is unassuming.
His curious blue eyes peer out behind a pair of sleek, wire spectacles befitting a professor, or in this case, an engineer, as he fiddles with a metal rod the length of a ruler. Sensors attached to the rod monitor it and display a signal on a computer screen represented by a red dot in the center of the screen. “I can give it the breathalyzer test,” Ames said in his soft-spoken tone before letting out a short puff of air near the metal rod.
Suddenly, the dot on the screen shoots upward in a line. The sensor, which can detect with fine accuracy the effect from the warmth of a person’s breath on metal, demonstrates the caliber of technology Blue Line makes. Each of the 100 to 200 sensors Blue Line Engineering produces every year is handmade.
“When it says it was Made in Colorado — it was made in Colorado,” Ames said. “Not just assembled in Colorado.” When it comes to Blue Line’s product delivery, such care is taken that a sensor, small enough to fit inside a lunchbox, is packed into a single cargo crate and transported within a half-semitrailer.
Only two crates are put into the trailer and are reinforced from within to protect the sen sor during transport. The truck’s drivers cannot stop for breaks except to refuel the semi. published Aug.
2023.
