Teknologic Purchases the Assets of Ross Laboratories Inc.
Teknologic Engineering Services Inc. of Edmonds Washington completed the asset purchase of Ross Laboratories Inc. on July 25 2014. The new Ross Labs LLC joins Teknologic LLC as an entity of the corporation. Brent Smith is CEO and Terry Stodeller is CFO of Teknologic. Smith and Bill Beatty senior program manager will be the primary contacts for Ross Labs LLC.
Jim Ross former owner and president of Ross Laboratories is staying with the company in an advisory capacity with the title of manager of sales and technical support. Former Ross Laboratories Inc. employees Duane Moloney Steve Reynolds and Dean Graddon will also continue with the company.
Ross and Teknologic both concentrate on underwater acoustics and have worked together over the years. When Ross approached Teknologic with an offer to sell there was no hesitation Smith said. It was a good match.
“We are both small agile companies and do things a little differently than large companies” said Smith.
Ross said “This is a good thing for Ross Laboratories and our customers. It will ensure the future for the support and modernization of our products and I will still be able to continue working with the many friends and great customers I have been fortunate to meet over the years providing sales and technical support.”
The Ross Laboratories building and boat dock on Lake Union in Seattle will remain under the ownership of the Ross family as will the 75-foot research vessel Golden Dolphin which has lab space and a small crane for testing hydrographic survey equipment. Teknologic will continue to charter the Golden Dolphin for product testing.
For now Ross Labs LLC will continue to operate in the Seattle facility and Teknologic plans to move the operation to a combined engineering and manufacturing facility in Edmonds in the future.
The company will continue to manufacture Ross Hydrographic survey equipment for shallow water surveying including the Ross Model 4810 sweep survey system with five to 24 channels the Model 875-X portable sweep system with three to eight channels for use on small skiffs or john boats the 4900 Series side scan sonar and sub-bottom profiler the Model 960 complete hydrographic survey system for use in small open boats the Model 825C portable survey recorder the Model 835C desktop survey recorder the Model 962 Hypack™ remote keyboard controller and the Model 5150 bar check system.
At the time of the sale Ross had an ongoing contract with the Corps of Engineers Galveston District to fit its 26-foot Port Isabel survey boat with a sweep survey system and the contract will continue under the new ownership. The system will be installed at Munson Aluminum Boats in Burlington Washington at the end of October.
About Teknologic
Teknologic was formed by former Raytheon engineers who opted to stay in Washington when Raytheon Mukilteo re-located to Portsmouth Rhode Island in 1999. The engineers had a history in acoustic transducer design sonar and imaging systems signal processing data acquisition analysis and display unmanned underwater and airborne vehicles control and monitoring systems mine countermeasures and test system development. The company’s clients were mostly in the defense industry in the beginning but are now 60 to 70 percent commercial.
Industries it serves include defense medical and marine science as well as UAV support design and manufacturing product development heavy machinery and SOLO water ski electronics in the commercial sector. It provides product development including testing and production on designs that prove to be viable.
Among the company’s evolving products is an acoustic fish tag receiver used in the effort to re-establish the salmon populations in Washington and California. Under a government program small individually identified tags are injected into juvenile salmon for release into rivers and estuaries. When the year-old juvenile salmon begin to make their way to the sea they are tracked by the receivers located autonomously in the river between dams and other man-made structures. The government wants to achieve a 96 percent survival rate of fish reaching the sea. Over the years Teknologic has improved the receivers from only censusing to collecting additional types of data such as fish movements (3D tracking).
About Ross
In 1953 Wayne Ross produced the first compact depth sounder small enough to fit on both pleasure and commercial fishing boats and began producing them under the company name Ross Laboratories Inc. He built the present building in 1962 and added a second story in 1970 across the street from the boat moorage and there developed and produced systems for the hydrographic survey and fishing industries.
In 1969 along with NOAA and Digital Equipment Corp. he helped interface the first depth digitizer to an onboard computer. This state-of-the art system was installed on the NOAA ship Whiting at Norfolk Virginia more than a decade earlier than the rest of the industry began digitizing acoustic signals. The company’s boom-mounted hydrographic sweep systems are a standard for surveying in river currents and are used in a number of Corps of Engineers districts along with single and dualfrequency single beam sounders and full hydrographic survey systems.
The new Ross phone number is 425-771-0665. The website is www.rosslabsllc.com. Email addresses are: Jim Ross jim-ross@rosslabsllc.com; Brent Smith brent-smith@rosslabsllc.com; and Bill Beatty bill-beatty@rosslabsllc.com. Teknologic’s website is www.teknologic.net
