Sales Manager Discovers the Art of Building Gas Cylinders & Cryogenic Vessels

Kirill Zelin, our sales manager for the Northeast U.S. and Canada, has been seeing his job through new eyes recently.

Kirill spent the last two weeks at our production plant in Aurora Illinois shadowing technicians who work in the high pressure cylinder production line and cryogenic vessel facility.

Moving from station to station, he was instructed how to operate the equipment, choose the proper parts for the assembly, and perform the specialized skills needed to complete each step to build high pressure gas cylinders as well as cryogenic vessels.

He spent his first week working in the high pressure cylinder production line, and the second week with cryogenic vessel assembly and restoration.

Building a cylinder from beginning-to-end becomes an invaluable experience

“There are way more steps to processing a cylinder than I realized! The speed at which our team is able to take a cylinder from an unfinished container to a complete product is remarkable,” said Kirill.

“Working at the various stations I was able to see how our investments in equipment have really expedited the process while creating an even more consistently great product; this applies to everything from neck rings, custom stamping, valve taping, valve installation, and painting.”

“There are a lot of lifelong employees with passion for their work. These guys and gals really do see it as a craft they are perfecting.”

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Kirill continued, “Speaking of perfecting the craft – I was amazed by our cryogenics repair team. Many of them have been with the company 18+ years so it makes sense how good they are, but I was still in awe seeing how they worked so quickly and precisely to replace regulators, repair plumbing, or create new top works configurations.”

“I got to feel like a scientist working our mass spectrometer and diffusion pumps to check for leaks and work on the vacuum. Some of the tanks arrive in such bad condition, especially food service ones, but our team gets them looking brand new! We put them through our specialized buffing machine to get them looking new again.”

“CylConnect^® telemetry and Level-Eye digital gauges are installed by the cryogenics team as well. They were moving through hundreds of these gauges pretty fast, given that it took me a few minutes just to thread a single wand into the safety ring of the tank.”

You feel really ‘small’ working on a bulk tank, such as in my case when you’re only 5’6″ (5’6″ & ¾” on a good day!). The QC process on big cryogenics bulk tanks is intense. Before we ship an order, we spend the resources to fill them all with the appropriate gases and over a period of several days, perform various tests to check that each component is working as intended.”

“The configuration is always a custom setup uniquely designed for each of our customers’ needs. This past week, I got to work directly with our Cryogenics Plant Manager setting up a pressure builder and economizer to new settings for a customer install that I have the first week of March!”

Kirill’s hands-on training not only provided him a brand new perspective of what it takes to process, produce, and ship gas cylinders and cryogenic vessels day-to-day, but it also helped him develop a deeper appreciation of our skilled technicians in our production plant.

His firsthand experience is now an invaluable part of Kirill’s sales skills set where he can effectively and expertly service all of Cyl-Tec’s customers.