Click here or on the banner to the left to check out WCIA’s news story about the Viper Mine Rescue team.

If you watch closely (about 1:23 minutes in to be exact), you’ll see ILMO’s 2010 Mining Safety banner in one of the shots. The Viper Mine in Williamsville, IL was one of nine ILMO gas customers to receive this year’s Safety Banner featuring the mine’s name, an MSHA safety slogan, and logos from ILMO and various Thermadyne product lines used in mine welding. (Video and article credit to www.illinoishomepage.net)

Tube City, in Granite City, IL, is a leading provider of outsourced steel services, including raw materials procurement, scrap management, raw materials optimization, slag processing, metal recovery and surface conditioning services to integrated steel mills, mini-mills and foundries. Like many companies with a heavy use of gases for cutting metals, they quickly found themselves overwhelmed with inefficiencies of time and money while catering to their gas supply.

In December 2008, Tube City had enough of these frustrations, peaking with troubles moving 18-packs of oxygen cylinders into and around various fields to cut steel. Adding more cylinders wasn’t the solution, as freight charges to get them there were growing, and just “making due” was no longer an option, as often two or more hours were lost in the moving of cylinder packs and safety was compromised.   (more…)

While welding helmets are designed to protect you from the visible and invisible (ultraviolet and infrared) rays a welding arc emits, not all helmets are created equal. There are numerous options: passive or auto-darkening lens, fixed or variable shade, two, three or four sensors, viewing size. Taking the time to find the right helmet for your needs can increase your productivity and weld quality, as well as your comfort.

First, any helmet you choose should meet ANSI Z87.1 – 2003  (also referred to as ANSI Z87+) standards, which ensure that…   (more…)

Health-care business grows for ILMO

But as with any number of industries, the growth of late is in healthcare.

A just-completed seven-year agreement to provide bulk liquid oxygen— used to produce medical oxygen for a variety of treatments — to St. John’s Hospital adds to a network of medical customers that already includes hospitals, laboratories, nursing homes and universities across central and southern Illinois and northeast Missouri.   (more…)

To say that Gailyn -Gay- Cornell can take control a room would be an understatement. She’s a firecracker, a pioneer in the welding field for women and all welding trainers, and she didn’t get that reputation by being satisfied with just a roomful of attention – she wants to speak to the world. Gay is the Branch Services Director at ILMO Products Company, an industrial, medical and specialty gases distributor in Illinois and Missouri, with roots in supplying gases, equipment, and supplies to the welding industry. She got her start with Lincoln Electric in the 1970’s in their welding program and has been a highly-involved advocate for the trade, and the American Welding Society, ever since.

In late 2009, Gay’s niece was sharing her plans to take part in her second medical mission trip to a remote mountainous area of Haiti – Calebasse – where the year before she saw first-hand the vibrant energy and desperate need of the people there. Her niece identified the potential for a drastic lifestyle improvement for the community if they could only manage their own metal work repairs, and Gay instantly joined the trip to teach them how to weld.

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