It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Wayne Tustin, founder and former president of ERI. Wayne passed away on May 10, 2018 at the age of 95. Wayne, a Fellow of the IEST, was involved in teaching of Vibration and Shock testing for 70 years. After his early years at Boeing in Seattle and MB Electronics in Connecticut, Wayne started his own training company called the Tustin Institute of Technology.
After selling the company and retiring to Arizona in his 70’s, Wayne decided he didn’t like retirement and founded ERI. Wayne, usually accompanied by his wife Shirley, traveled the world teaching Vibration and Shock Testing.
He was actively teaching classes until the age of 92.
Wayne was an icon in our industry, as well as a personal friend and mentor. He will be sorely missed.
I grew up in Seattle, Washington, where I attended the University of Washington and received the BSEE degree in 1944. After working briefly at the UW, in Los Angeles and in Seattle, I started at Boeing Airplane Company in 1948. That’s where I first encountered vibration and shock testing and measurement. Like nearly all of my present-day students, without any real preparation for the field, I stumbled into this interesting mechanical engineering field.
Boeing was building its own electrodynamic shakers (they were not yet commercially available) for what is nowadays called modal testing. I was part of the team that modal tested the XB52 model of the famous B52 bomber. Amazingly, here we are in the 21st century, and the USAF is still using B52s !
My next significant work was for MB Electronics (since reorganized as MB Dynamics) 1954-61 at New Haven, CT, at that time the world’s largest manufacturer of shakers for vibration testing. Vibration testing was at that time practically unknown (and is in 2014 still little known.) I headed Field Service and Technical Training. That experience led to founding a school that would offer vibration and shock short courses.
That first school was born in 1962 and supplied technical training to Government and Industry, teaching in the USA and abroad (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Singapore, South Africa and Sweden). It was sold in 1990, as I intended to retire. For a couple of years I consulted, commencing to use the business name Equipment Reliability Group (ERG), so that I could loosely associate with other consultants.
By 1995, when my non-compete agreement ended, I decided to “unretire” as Equipment Reliability Institute (ERI). ERI’s assets included my nearly fifty years in vibration (see the text “Vibration Pioneers”) and an estimated 10,000 past students, some of whom were now test and design managers who wanted me to teach their new people.
My training and consulting (licensed Professional Engineer in the State of California) interests lie in the environments that can cause equipment downtime. My particular concerns: dynamics, primarily the measurement, analysis and simulation (in environmental testing laboratories) of mechanical shock and vibration (particularly random vibration), also the stimulation of latent defects during new product development and as a final step in production, also acoustic noise, as in quieting products and in automotive “buzz, squeak and rattle” testing.
ERI instructors (including myself) are generalists who recognize that specialists in their fields outrank them technically. ERI training explains the often-highly-complex work of those specialists. ERI offers onsite as well as video teleconference training for test personnel, designers, quality and reliability engineers. Also distant learning in vibration and shock testing; e-mail speeds review problems. I’m available to consult on specific dynamics problems.
ERI explanations benefit not only test and development personnel (laboratory managers, test engineers, technicians and aides as well as designers) but also people from product quality, reliability and instrumentation whose activities require them to measure in-service dynamic events, generate and/or interpret test specifications and evaluate laboratory capabilities, testing machines and techniques. Many of these workers need simple working explanations of such subjects as random vibration.
My hard-cover textbook “A minimal-mathematics Introduction to the Fundamentals of Random Vibration & Shock Testing, Measurement, Analysis & Calibration, as applied to HALT, HASS & COTS in the fields of aeronautical, automotive, commercial, seismic and shipboard design and production,” in 2014 became a 33-chapter 1.5 GB ebook for iPad tablets and Mac computers.
Technical Societies
Fellow, Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (IEST). Member, Society of Environmental Engineers (England). Lecturer to the Institute of Radio Engineers (now IEEE), the Institute of Environmental Sciences, the Instrument Society of America, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society for Quality Control, the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Australian Organization for Quality Control and the Society of Environmental Engineers (England).
To National Meetings of the IEST in 1964, 1966, 1968, 1986, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2002, 2004 and 2006, he contributed papers on sinusoidal and random vibration testing, and participated in or chaired tutorial series on dynamics. At Anaheim in 1995 his tutorial sessions were entitled “Random Vibration Testing” and “Basic Vibrations.” For several years he headed a Working Group developing RP-013, IEST Recommended Practice on Vibration and Shock Test Fixture Design.
On behalf of the lEST, “Thank you for your contribution to the professional advancement of our attendees through your seminar at the lEST 55th Annual Technical Meeting. We truly appreciate your support, particularly this year. Your participation helped ensure the success of ESTECH in spite of an uncertain global economy.” Roberta Burrows, IEST Executive Director
He contributed “Why Test with Random Vibration?” January 1980 at the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) in San Francisco. He presented tutorials on random vibration and production environmental stress screening at Los Angeles in January 1988 and at Atlanta in January 1989.
At the Western Regional Conference of the American Society for Quality Control in Los Angeles, January, 1991, he spoke on “What is g2/Hz?” In May, 1981, at San Francisco, he expounded “Random Vibration for Stress Screening of Electronics.” He held forth on “Random Vibration Tests to MIL-STD-781C” at the ASQC Technical Conference at Chicago, May, 1978.
To the SAE Noise & Vibration Conference at Traverse City, Michigan, April, 1987, he presented “The Future of Random Vibration Screening and Testing in Automotive Engineering,” SAE paper 870984. For many years he taught SAE short course 92030 on “Automotive Vibration and BSR Testing” at Troy, MI.
Wayne is cited on pages 210-216 of “Pioneers of Shock and Vibration” by Michael T. Freeman and published as SVM-14 by the Shock and Vibration Analysis Center, Arlington, Virginia.