On Tuesday afternoon, roughly 30 guests suited up, donned safety googles, “Hi-Vis” vests and radio headsets and delved deep into Dubuque’s bustling city within a city, John Deere Dubuque Works.
It was one of several stops at area businesses Tuesday as Dubuque Area Chamber of Commerce marks Manufacturing Appreciation Week, which continues Thursday, May 15, highlighting and providing visitors with insight into the work of area manufacturers.
“John Deere, as well as several other employers, including our health care (sector) and our schools, are driving up what employment is in our area,” said Justine Paradiso, vice president of events and programs at the Dubuque chamber. “Everything they are doing is providing jobs, which is making families move here, resulting in homes being bought and usage of our schools and grocery stores. That is prosperity, and we’re lucky they’re here.”
At the Dubuque Works plant, bright LED lights glared down on a forest of towering machine casings and storage towers, some half-assembled. Robotic arms cycled in stilted stop-motion around components, coating, welding, cutting and holding.
Various energies flashed and strobed around the perimeter of the tour as it traveled along miniature cement roads complete with pedestrian lanes. Experimental robotic carts scuttled, and dozens of engineers and assembly line workers plied their trades.
The warehouse exceeds a mile in length, part of a complex stretching across over 1,465 acres. Despite challenges in the market last fiscal year, the complex is packed to the brim with crawler loader and dozer manufacturing lines, plus overflow orders from other facilities. A fully automated experimental assembly line is in the early stages of construction, said tour guide Don Jecklin, a John Deere retiree who spent decades at the plant.
The tour’s next and fifth stop of the day was at IBI Scientific, a life science lab equipment manufacturer that has diversified into DNA and RNA extraction reagents and cellular growth mediums.
The majority of the locally assembled lab equipment IBI produces is made of chemically soldered cast acrylic, with the exception of the “Belly Dancer” line of test tube shakers, which are made of stainless steel and anodized aluminum sheet metal machined next door at Giese Manufacturing and detailed by Digital Designs.
Belly Dancer and its smaller companion Belly Button device are used by researchers in the process of dyeing biological molecules that researchers are trying to track and ensuring circulation of nutrients in cell cultures often used to manufacture proteins with medical uses.
IBI custom machines a variety of cast acrylic items including rat-holders for researchers doing animal studies. Non-sheet metal machining is usually done at Dubuque Screw Products Inc., also nearby.
“A lot of diagnostic kits made today are developed through trial and error,” IBI President Pat Mueller said. “It’s all done through microbiology; it’s all done through science — eliminating the options getting down to what works and what doesn’t.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, supply lines for reagents became unreliable and shipping costs became prohibitive. After a temporary period of outsourcing to a friend within the industry based in California, Mueller made the decision to begin local production of laboratory and medical-grade reagents, which require extensively filtered water, and occasionally, a completely sterile work and packaging environment.
IBI’s setup runs water through a series of filters including several water softeners, an activated carbon filter, two-membrane reverse osmosis filter, electronic deionization filter, a minuscule 0.05 micrometer filter, an ultraviolet light chamber to kill any living organisms, and a three-membrane 0.03 micrometer filter to remove the remains of any organics. Once totally processed, the water is constantly circulated to prevent any new life from growing on a microscopic level.
The end result is completely pure water that can be used for DNA and RNA testing without fear of any biological life confounding results.
It’s also used when creating solutions designed to make cell cultures grow because any contamination will result in a random organism consuming the growth medium and contaminating lab samples.
For this work, a sterilized room is used to prevent air contaminants from seeding the medium. Most of the work is done with materials within 50 miles of Dubuque.
“We do manufacturing appreciation tours every year to highlight that things are being made in Dubuque,” Paradiso said. “IBI scientific is a great example because of the partnerships they have made with other Dubuque businesses. … It’s making Dubuque a better place to live, work, play and do business.”