Page 39 - BusinessWest March 18, 2024

“Manufacturers are tired of the revolving door. They bring someone in, they train them for a week, and then they’re gone.
So, increasingly, they’re looking at robots.”
allows Ames to access remote locations and control machines with just a few clicks.
These acronyms come together in an industry, and a business, that has emerged, grown, and evolved over the past four decades, and continues to do so.
As noted earlier, Ames was a chef before enrolling at STCC and then working at Elm Electrical and then Kellogg Brush and even- tually starting that moonlighting with auto- mated systems.
He started in 1992 at Yankee Candle as
it was opening its village in South Deerfield, specifically with developing, building, and pro- gramming ‘Santa’s toy machine,’ which made it appear that toys were going into a huge
box in pieces and coming out as finished products.
“Part of it was to make it sort of this Willy
Wonka/Rube Goldberg machine-looking
mechanical contraption,” he recalled, adding
that he worked with Yankee Candle founder
Michael Kittredge on the project. “He said, ‘I
want it to do this ... I want this valve to make
this thing spin, and all these lights to blink, the conveyer to run, to turn the snow on and off in the windows outside, etc.’ I’ll bet there were 25-foot-diameter gears on the wall with little motors that I had to make run.”
From there, Ames worked with several other moonlighting cus- tomers offering their own versions of ‘I want it to do this.’ Those experiences provided him with the confidence to go into business for himself in the spring of 1992 when he was laid off from Kellogg Brush as it was downsizing.
“I made four phone calls that day, and three people called me back,” he said, adding that one of them was Hillside Plastics in near- by Turners Falls, which would go on to be a steady customer.
He initially operated out of his house in Montague, working there
Ames Electrical has become New England’s only authorized distributor and integrator of NACHI Robotics Systems.
during the day and then for OEM Kingsbury Corp. in New Hamp- shire at night, before focusing exclusively on his own work.
Over the past 30 years, the company has survived disruptive forces ranging from the Great Recession, when the phone stopped
ringing and he started thinking about returning to work as a chef, to the
Ames
Continued on page 42
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