With the departure of the Conviron business, Ed and Terry Van Humbeck asked me to take on a new venture – creating the APT Division and leading it into the power utility sector.
We had been doing collaborative work with Dr. Glenn Swift and colleagues at the University of Manitoba for years, but the designs were theirs, and we found them to be difficult to build. They didn’t necessarily design for production. This would take our learning from those efforts, and create entirely new products.
I hand-picked my dream team, and they gave me all the persons I asked for, except for one – my friend Filipe, who was very busy working in the Vansco PC division. Vansco built us a new office area in the strip mall at 1253 Clarence, next to the Wire Harness Division, and we got started.
For the next 4 years, I was Chief Architect, Hardware Designer, Low Level Firmware Developer, IRIG-B Processor Developer, Product Development Manager, General Manager, and reported to the board meeting monthly. It was pretty crazy – kind of hazy now, honestly, as I worked far too hard during this time. But, did we accomplish a lot!