Aiming for Perfection
As the Quality Control Supervisor, Joe Allan he is responsible for quality control in the areas of fabrication and paint. That means, among other things, insuring that each hand-sanded cabinet surface is flat within 4/1000 of an inch. Joe and his brother Jace (the Polishing Supervisor) leave home at 3:45 a.m. each weekday to travel the 67 miles to Provo from the small farming community of Spring City where they’ve chosen to live. Joe’s shift begins at 7 a.m., but he opts to arrive two hours early so his crew will have things to work on as soon as they arrive. When pressed about why he does it, Joe confesses, “I love the idea of perfection. And this a place where I’m rewarded for trying to achieve it.” |
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Using a calibrated stainless precision straight edge bar and a feeler tool, Joe looks for any anomalies in a hand-sanded Sophia cabinet. If the flat blade of the feeler tool—which is exactly 4/1000 of an inch thick— slides beneath the bar at any point, it indicates a deviation from flatness unacceptable to Wilson: the cabinet is rejected. The reason for such extreme tolerances is simple. The enclosure receives its eight layers of WilsonGloss™ paint and clearcoat before it is wet sanded and buffed to a mirrorlike finish. Any underlying bumps, divots, valleys or ridges would then be visible to the naked eye. That kind of commitment to the fit and finish of our products would be an empty irony if it didn't represent the underlying commitment to how our speaker cabinets are constructed and how they sound. The continuing quest for more refined cabinet materials reveals, as much as anything, the depth of our intense—some would say fanatical—drive to make our loudspeakers sound like live music. |
A Message from Dave Wilson • Passion • A Vision • Teamwork • Materials • Drivers • Crossovers & Cables • The WilsonGloss Finish • From Our Place to Yours |
