06.05.2017, RADFORD, VA – Thomson Industries, a leading manufacturer of mechanical motion control solutions, has donated a high-precision ball screw assembly to The Geek Group National Science Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to help develop revolutionary designs of Tesla Coils (TC). An ambitious R&D program has been initiated there to discover new uses for the TC with help from a new automated process for winding coils.

Thomson was selected because of their top-notch application engineering support and breadth of product offerings, which enabled delivery of an optimal complete ball screw assembly. That Thomson ball screw assembly will help The Geek Group’s high-energy engineering team convert from typical manual winding to a much faster, more accurate automated process for winding thousands of coils required to conduct their experiments.

A Thomson customer support engineer guided The Geek Group engineering team in selecting the exact configuration to best match their needs. The product selected was a quick-install ball screw assembly that avoids any precision problems that may result from assembling components on site. The final configuration consisted of a Thomson FSI Style ball nut along with an eight-foot-long ball screw just under an inch in diameter.

Thomson FSI Style Metric Precision Ball Screw

“We set our IRC team on the task of finding the best linear motion technology in the industry,” said Chris Boden, CEO of The Geek Group. “The team, composed of a couple hundred experts from many science and technology disciplines, analyzed about a dozen different products and concluded that only the Thomson drive could do exactly what we needed and exactly how we wanted to do it”.

The TC production program has already begun, and The Geek Group has plans for experimenting with larger coils in the future.

About Thomson Industries, Inc.

With more than 70 years of motion control innovation and quality, Thomson is the industry’s premier producer of Linear Ball Bushing® Bearings and Profile Rail Bearings, 60 Case® Shafting, Ground and Rolled Ball Screws, Linear Actuators, Gearheads, Clutches, Brakes, Linear Systems and related accessories. Thomson invented the Linear Ball Bushing Bearing in 1945 and has set the standard ever since with an unsurpassed set of mechanical motion control solutions serving global commercial and aerospace and defense markets. Thomson has facilities in North America, Europe and Asia with more than 2000 distributor locations around the world.

Thomson Industries, Inc., 203A West Rock Road, Radford, VA 24141; 1-540-633-3549; 1-540-633-0294 (fax); Thomson@thomsonlinear.com; www.thomsonlinear.com.