Bruce Jaeger Technical Services                 5500 80th Avenue North • Brooklyn Park, MN 55443 (763) 560-7663 Email: Bruce@BJTechServ.com
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Since 1983, I've been preparing Operation and Maintenance manuals for custom machinery manufacturers in the Twin Cities area. This site has descriptions of the various services I have performed.

The machines have had interesting variations in product transport: flat conveyors, cleated conveyors (both continuous and indexing), free-floating pallets on flat conveyors (gripped and held at various manufacturing stations), "walking beam" transports, rotary turrets, and screw drives (sometimes with variable pitch to match speeds between different substations).  And, of course, manual transport for testing and lab work.  (Using Whyte nomenclature, this last would be an "0-5-0."  If you understood that, you must be an ferroequinologist*.)

Sample manuals are a problem, because most (if not all) of these machines are proprietary. (You wouldn't want yours presented as a sample!) Here are a couple of older machine manuals from defunct companies that I've modified to disguise both the manufacturer and their customer:

Terminal_Assembler_Rev_C.pdf
Valley_Girl_30440_Rev_A4.pdf  

Since they're older machines, the design of the manuals is somewhat dated, too, of course.  (A manual's design is almost always determined by the customer, and usually reflects their previously-released manuals.)

Services:

• Operations and Maintenance manuals:   For the most part, the manuals I've prepared have been for custom packaging machinery and for pharmaceutical filling lines.  Other projects have been manuals for a surgical gown manufacturing machine, oil filter assemblers, food packagers and various testing machinery, including (blush) a machine that squeezed douche bags to make sure they didn't leak.

• Computer software and hardware manuals: Past customers include Springboard Software, DigiBoard / Digi International and Chameleon Management Solutions, Inc.

• Engineering Manuals and In-House Documents: (Company policies, standards, etc.)   My most recent effort along this line is an intranet web version of a company engineering standards manual. Very convenient! And no more having to update every engineer's copy... 

• Catalogs. Limited run, small business types. See Great Northern Antiques. 

• Programs:  Most of these have been related to music. See  2009 Laughing Waters Bluegrass Festival.

• Archiving: (Organizing, 35mm negative scanning / photo scanning, CD-ROM burning, etc.) Most of this has been for my own business, but the techniques and tricks I've picked up could be useful for yours.  I've recently been scanning in 20-year-old manuals, as storage is getting to be a problem.  I scan them for good text reproduction, then digitally paste in the original photos (assuming I can still find them!) and output the whole thing as a print-quality PDF file. This way I can still supply a manual when somebody loses theirs, but don't have to store the paper manual any more.  My very first original manuals were composed on a Commodore PET or 64, so there's no electronic text. With later ones, I'm converting them to the most recent software I have. This is something that should be done by all of us periodically.

• Translation translations: For multinational corporations selling in the USA, I can take a quick look at your in-house translation and fix the terminology and idioms that drive consumers here crazy and that make your company look not as good as it should.

• PowerPoint to DVD: I learned how to do this for a customer who couldn't count on being able to use a projector at a customer's site, but could always rely on a DVD player.  You lose some clarity (due to the DVD's lower resolution), but end up with a more universally playable presentation.

• VHS to DVD: Many of my customers have VHS tapes of their products that take up more space than DVDs. The magnetic oxide on those tapes deteriorates with time, too.  I can also supply MPEG, DIVX, or smaller web-compatible files

• "Make it look better": One of my customers was about to send out a sales email (Adobe Acrobat format) with some diagrams created in Paintbrush (ugh!).  Please let me spend an hour on it so it doesn't look so bad!  I can also extract text and graphics from PDF files and modify them for your applications.

• Web Sites: While this web site is no great shakes (the cobbler's son has no shoes, the plumber's faucet drips...), the one I created and maintain for the Middle Spunk Creek Boys is pretty neat. (Or will be again when I get around to updating it to CSS...) Or see Great Northern Antiques.  It's not what I really do (and don't want to get into full time), but I can probably help.

•  Brochures / newsletters / "Promo": Again, most of these have been related to music. See the older (now obsolete) MSCB Promo Pack (408K .pdf file) or the somewhat newer MSCB Promo Sheet.

• Visual Basic Custom Programming:  Microsoft has done its best to kill this, but the projects still run on Vista. These have primarily been killer front-ends for Access databases, with a few of my own utilities (see the link "Utilities" link at the top of this page) thrown in. In my freelance writing days, I wrote dozens of "type-in" programs for Commodore-related magazines, and did programming-for-hire for programs like "Planting Pal" (a gardening program) and "Magic Mover" (a rearrange-the-furniture program). I miss the "good old days" when I got powerful royalty checks from Share Data ("Load 'n Go Software") for my game programs.  I'm not up to speed on VB.net, as its database capabilities seem inferior to the "old" VB, and programming isn't the thrill it used to be.

• Old CorelDRAW Conversions: I've kept an "ancient" 286 PC with CorelDRAW 1.1 on it, so I can read your files from WAY back then and convert them to a modern format for you. (The fonts may suffer if you used unusual WFN fonts.) I also have CorelDRAW 3 on another older machine to read CorelDRAW 1.2 -- 3.0 files, so they can be saved in a format readable by X4 and above.

History of Bruce Jaeger Technical Services

Bruce Jaeger Technical Services is a one-man company--I picked that rather long name when I had to get a sales tax number.  (If you put your full name in a company title, you don't have to file d.b.a. papers.) It also helps keep me from being confused with dozens of other businesses like Bruce Jaeger Aroma Therapy for Horses, Bruce Jaeger Holistic Drain Cleaning, or Bruce Jaeger Silicone Thigh Implant Company.

After working in the retail music world (yech!) and as a freelance magazine writer (starve!), I got started in the technical writing business in 1983 when an engineer at TL Systems Corporation threw up his hands and refused to write any more machinery manuals. (A high-school buddy worked there, and he knew that I had a journalism degree and some mechanical ability because of my sports car autocross and rally days.)

Almost every new customer since then has come about because an engineer moved to another employer, was told to write the manual about his machine, threw up his hands and said "Not me! But I know somebody who CAN!" What's hard to believe is that I actually enjoy doing it.

My first manuals were written on a Commodore PET (I missed using a typewriter for them by just a year) and printed on either a dot-matrix printer or a Juki daisywheel. I processed and screened my own B&W photos for the press runs of up to 15 manuals. Now, of course, it's digital photography and color lasers. (For archival purposes, I'm slowly scanning in all of my old B&W 35mm negatives.)

Customers:      (In no particular order. Not all are current customers. Not all are still in business. Honest, it wasn't my fault!)

TL Systems Corporation (now Bosch Packaging Technology, NA) Springboard Software (R.I.P.) DigiBoard (now Digi International, Inc.) Massman Engineering LLC. Midmac Systems Inc. (R.I.P.) Classic Manufacturing Inc. Pinnacle Feeding Systems Inc. Despatch Industries Great Northern Antiques LasX Industries Inc. Tech Logic Corporation Minnesota Transportation Museum (pro bono--draft manual for the Minnehaha steamboat) Dimension Industries, Inc. International Wolf Center Home & Hobby Software (R.I.P.) Lyons Safety

Intelligent Automated Machines, Inc. Community Literacy Collaborative Chameleon Management Solutions, Inc. (R.I.P.) Minnesota Literacy Council (pro bono) Miram International, Inc. (R.I.P.) Paragon Machinery Corporation Pharmaceutical Feeding Corporation (R.I.P.) Scherping Systems Straub Design Company TL Feeding Systems (R.I.P.) Tricord Systems, Inc. ViatiCare Financial Services, LLC Automation Engineering (R.I.P.) Voyager Mindtools, Inc. (R.I.P.) Magid Glove and Safety

Personal

I play with trains, computers, and musical instruments. The "Bruce's Scrapbook" page will tell you more than you can possibly want to know.

Thanks for your interest!

BRUCE

Stupid link!

* "Iron Horse" (steam locomotive) lover.