by Alex Brooks
VPS Controls held an Open House on Friday to show off their new building in Hoosick. The company moved into their new quarters last Memorial Day weekend. From 1986 until then they had occupied a rented building in South Troy.
The new address of the company is 19 Hill Road in Hoosick, just in from the Route 7 intersection where Seifert’s Auction House and the Big Moose Deli are. The land on which it sits was once the playing fields of the Hoosac School before they moved from their old campus, which was mainly between All Saints Church and the Hill Road.
The company makes Flexball cables, which are high performance mechanical control cables used in trains, military vessels and vehicles and other applications where a stronger or more precise push-pull control cable is needed.
The new building was built by Hos-Cot Builders starting in August of 2008, with site preparations by Duane Goodermote Excavation going on through August and September. The shell was put up starting in October and going into January, with the finish work going on through the spring, completed in May.
The Open House was very well attended, with a total of 95 visitors through the afternoon. Rensselaer County Executive Kathy Jimino visited as did Hoosick Town Supervisor Marilyn Douglas and Rensselaer County Legislators Stan Brownell and Lester Goodermote. A Powerpoint® presentation about the company and the building greeted visitors as they entered through the well appointed corporate offices, and company employees were stationed on the shop floor to show visitors how the cables are made and how they work. Refreshments, catered by Helvi’s, were set up in a tent out back, where Dottie Cross provided music.
VPS Controls, which now has 16 employees, was founded in 1983 to promote the Flexball cable in North America. It was a partnership between Peter Schaaphok, Piet Vorbrueggen, who headed a German company making these cables, and Michel Pommey, who headed a French company which makes the cables. For the first three years the company sold and imported
the European cables until they set up their own manufacturing facility in South Troy in 1986. Vorbrueggen has since passed away, and Pommey has retired, and there is no longer any formal connection between VPS and the European companies it worked with in the early days. Michel Pommey made the trip from France to help Schaaphok celebrate the move to his own building and was there for the Open House last Friday.
A conventional control cable, such as those used for the handbrake of a bicycle, tends to get bogged down by friction, especially if the cables are long or turn corners. A Flexball cable has little ball bearings inside the sheath which allow it to move more freely, giving it much greater strength, precision and reliability than a conventional cable. VPS cables were used in the rail cars of transit systems in New York, Chicago, Toronto and Montreal as well as the Acela high speed train. They are used in military vehicles including the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, armored personnel carriers and amphibious assault vehicles as well as Navy and Coast Guard ships. Other applications have included lifeboat release systems on oil rigs and cruise ships, snow grooming machines and nuclear power plants. A VPS cable was used in the gear shift mechanism of the car that won the Indianapolis 500 in 2005, #26 driven by Dan Wheldon for Andretti Green Racing.