I don’t know that having a sense of humor is a requirement for employment here at The Cleveland Vibrator Company, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt!  Perhaps it’s a bit like the old Johnny Cash song about a boy named Sue; you’ve got to expect some off the wall comments when your employer is The Cleveland VIBRATOR Company!  Hard not to be at some sort of gathering and someone asks what you do or where you work.  Yea sure, Cleveland VIBRATOR, you can see them fighting back the smile and probably more than a couple of questions.  I used to be in the Army Reserves and spent the last few years of my service in a school unit as an instructor and eventually as a course manager.  Our mission was to teach soldiers who wanted to change career fields and get a new “MOS” or job skill.  At the end of the “report day” once we’d in-processed all the students into the course we would have a brief introduction to the school, the course and the staff.  We’d go around the class and have each student talk a bit about themselves, military experience and civilian career, always fascinating.  After we worked through the students then the staff would do the same.  I always got a kick out of saying, “I’m Master Sergeant David Strong, so on and so forth, I’m a mechanical engineer and work for The Cleveland Vibrator Company.”   I always gave it a long pause and then added “and no…we don’t make hand held pleasure devices!”  You can probably imagine the response.

I’ve always sort of figured that Cleveland Vibrator should have laid claim to the term “vibrator” before it acquired its more commonly held modern connotation.  But I really wasn’t sure if that’s the case.  Cleveland Vibrator was founded back in 1923 and I figure that when the Becker family started making industrial vibrators in a garage, it was well ahead of the manufacture of the “hand held pleasure devices”.  Fortunately, Wikipedia is around to come to my aid and answer some important questions.  According to the entry I read “Hamilton Beach patented the first electric vibrator available for consumer retail sale as opposed to medical usage, making the vibrator the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster”, certainly an interesting sequence of products. Apparently this device was advertised regularly in a variety of publications at the time but pretty much disappeared in the 1920s.  The non-industrial vibrator made a big comeback in the 1960s.  Per Wikipedia, “on June 30, 1966 Jon H. Travel applied for a patent for the “Cordless Electric Vibrator for Use on the Human Body”, ushering in the modern personal vibrator.”  The cordless vibrator was eventually granted a patent on March 28, 1968.  By then Justin Becker and The Cleveland Vibrator Company had been making industrial vibrators for 45 years.  So I’m thinking Cleveland Vibrator was “there first” and I just don’t get all the funny looks when I say where I work, shouldn’t everyone think of industrial vibrators first?

Early products manufactured by Cleveland Vibrator included piston vibrators and rotational ball vibrators.  “Air manufacturing” as we call it internally, has always been the core of the company.  Pneumatic piston vibrators have been a critical product since the beginning, “The Cleveland”, has been well known in the marketplace for generations.  Over the years improvements have been made to that family of products, probably the most significant being the introduction of the “Vibra-Might” family of springless vibrators.  The design of the internal features of the vibrator allowed Cleveland Vibrator to remove the internal spring, common to piston vibrators and a maintenance issue, and still have the unit start and run reliably in a variety of orientations and input air pressures.  Along with modifications in the design, improvements in the manufacturing process have included increased reliance on CNC machining, close tolerance honing of the body and the incorporation of a variety of coatings and surface treatments, resulting in a reliable, robust unit well suited for countless applications.

While the pneumatic piston vibrator is often installed as a flow aid it’s equally at home and effective when used on vibratory equipment.  I recently completed the design of a flat deck vibratory table using two 1300 VMSAC, air cushioned piston vibrators.  Very simple and straightforward design, the pneumatic vibrator produces the linear force required for the application.  Earlier this year we designed and built a vibratory hopper screener unit, powered by a single 1500 VMSAC pneumatic vibrator.  The end user is screening hardwood charcoal and need the benefits of the piston vibrator.  There’s a video of this unit posted on Cleveland Vibrator’s Youtube channel, it’s worth a peek.  Another interesting misconception when you talk about vibrators, besides the “pleasure device” one, is that pneumatic vibrators are noisy.  Certainly impact units generate some noise but “air cushioned” units are surprisingly quiet.  If you check out the posted video you can hear background chatter in the manufacturing area but you’re not overwhelmed by the noise generated by the vibrator.  The air cushioned design is another great feature of this rugged and robust product line.

In the years since Mr. Travel got the patent for his vibrator, Cleveland Vibrator has been continuing to work on its type of vibrator, industrial style!  In the last couple of years we’ve started adding our own pneumatic turbine vibrators to the product line.  When I started working on Cleveland Vibrator’s own turbine vibrators, I began by designing the first units around the body castings of our established pneumatic ball vibrator line, the Vibraball Econ-o-line.  While turbine vibrators tend to be more expensive than a ball vibrator, they out perform a similar sized ball vibrator both in force output and reduced air consumption, plus they are significantly less noisy, a win-win-win situation.  My thinking was that it would make for an easy transition for customers to move from the ball vibrator to the turbine if the physical size and mounting was exactly the same as the ball vibrator that customer’s where familiar with.  We’ve continued to expand the turbine vibrator line, creating smaller and larger units, plus offering the units in acetal plastic, stainless steel and aluminum.

For Cleveland Vibrator, pneumatic turbine vibrators have been a bit of a take-off on the movie Field of Dreams, “if you build it, he will come,” philosophy.   For us, “he” has been applications.   At one point in time the smallest turbine vibrator we had was the CVT-30 based on the body cast of our VBB-30, ball vibrator.  I got a call from an engineer working for a firm that makes contact lenses; he was looking for a small vibrator to assist in vibrating the contact lens into place on a fixture.  He ended up working with the CVT-P-30, an acetal bodied version on the CVT-30, but his inquiry got me thinking about going smaller with the design.  How small could we reasonably go and what would that look like?  That question ended up yielding the CVT-P-10 and the CVT-P-1.  Built without knowing for sure if there was an existing market or demand for this unit, we’ve found it to be very successful.  “He” has indeed come; the CVT-P-10 along with its metric and stainless steel versions is without a doubt our best-selling turbine vibrator.  Apparently, the need was out there and Cleveland Vibrator was able to fill that need.  I find it really amazing to get a glimpse of some of our customers’ uses for this small but powerful vibrator.  As for the “latest” technology, we’re currently working with a vendor that uses “3d printing” or additive manufacturing to produce the impeller for our CVT-P-10 series turbine vibrator, pretty cool stuff.

So looking back, I think Cleveland Vibrator and industrial vibrators should be the first thing that pops into a person’s head when they hear the term “vibrator” not the old “hand held pleasure device” thing!  I think we’ve earned it.  But honestly it’s probably going to be difficult to get folks to “go with the flow” and reorient their thinking, even if its vibration aided! Until that happens I guess I’ll keep smiling and try to politely say, “No, we don’t make that kind of vibrator”.