What is an Industrial Light Curtain?
Safety…safety…safety... The entire purpose of a “safety” light curtain is to protect humans from dangerous machinery. “Dangerous machinery” is considered any machine or piece of equipment that moves in a way that could cause injury or kill you. So what do...
What is a Safety Disconnect Switch and why do I need one?
We've recently added a new product category to our website – Safety Disconnect Switches! For those of you without a full electrical engineering background, you may wonder why this is so exciting for us. For this reason we wanted to give you a quick...
Looking for a Yokogawa Big Look panel meter?
If you have been using Yokogawa's Big Look panel meter, you might be having a hard time finding it. Yokogawa left the analog panel meter market in March 2017 and this has many customers looking to find a new source. For Yokogawa's “Big Look” series...
Introducing Wolfie’s New Clothes
For a few months now we've been discussing our mascot "Wolfie" and how he needed some more personality. Morgan, our content designer, finally had a chance to come up with a new body for Wolfie in order to give him some more character. We wanted...
Out with the old, in with the new! Weg is updating their VSDs!
Weg has announced that two of their popular drive series will now be considered non-stock; CFW10 and CFW100. They have also released their new CFW300 series as the replacement! Non-stock means that once existing inventory is gone any new orders would be 8-10 week...
How to Program a VFD
This is a tutorial covering the basics of programming a VFD, strictly focusing on getting the shaft of just about any VFD to turn via the keypad on the VFD without load on motor. To start things off…let’s begin by opening the manual. That’s right! First we must...
Fused Disconnect Switches Now Available from Socomec
Socomec’s line of industrial fusible disconnects is rich in features capable of providing a complete package while meeting many conforming standards such as; (IEC, UL, CSA) and specifically, IEC 60947-3, NFPA79 (2002 ed.), UL489 (w/restrictions), UL98 (w/...
Why Do I Want to Use An Ultrasonic Sensor?
In the most demanding of applications one type of sensor stands out amongst the sensor crowd, ultrasonic technology can be the savior in your application needs. The ultrasonic success is due to its high reliability. Versatile in a plethora of situations for object...
Marshall Wolf supports our neighbors
Rain, rain, go away...come again some other day! The new song residents of Algonquin, and most of Northern Illinois, seems to be singing lately. If you are just tuning into the news for the first time in almost two weeks, you may just be hearing how the...
What’s the “Process Side” of Pepperl+Fuchs?
Good Question? Internally, our pet name for this side of business for PEPPERL+FUCHS is the “Dark Side.” This isn’t necessarily because we view them as the EMPIRE, but because it used to be a bigger mystery side of Pepperl+Fuchs. Not exactly the environment...
What is a P.I.C? Panel Interface Connector
P.I.C.s from MENCOM are probably the most popular in sales on our site only competing with Mencom’s good old “cord grips”. You may ask yourself, what is P.I.C.? That’s actually a really broad category of industrial products. Let’s just start off with a...
GE Industrial Solutions Gets a New Name!
GE has announced that effective August 1st, 2017 GE Industrial Solutions will be known as Industrial Connections & Solutions LLC, a new GE-affiliated legal entity. As many of us learned late last year, the GE Industrial Solutions division was up for sale. What...
Engineering Competition at Wolf Automation
Once in a blue moon Marshall Wolf likes to give the employees a chance to stretch their engineering muscles. With our systems integration constantly producing new and innovative products, our Panel Shop manager Jon Wolf sent out a little competitive email...
The new VFD from FUJI….The “ACE” enters the room
What’s so cool about this VFD? Is it the simple fact that it’s taking over for the tried and true Frenic Multi? As the old guard fades away the new gunslinger makes its appearance known. What’s to like about this new offering? Well let’s explore a little bit. The...
Vendor Spotlight: Transtecno
TRANSTECNO may not be as recognizable as Bonfiglioli or Motovario in the gearbox/power transmission world, but they have a fantastic and wide array of offerings in the world of gearboxes. With products tailored towards the poultry/pig industry, bioenergy, solar...
Leeson’s Single Phase Unicorn
Finding a single phase input/output VFD can feel like finding a clean photo of Sasquatch. You’ve heard they exist, but can be difficult actually finding one... With the bulk of consumers using the more popular 'VFD and 3-phase motor' pairing, the market for these...
Vendor Spotlight: Pizzato
The company currently known as ‘Pizzato Elettrica’ had their modest start in 1984 simply as ‘Pizzato’ producing position switches. In the following 33 years Pizzato established themselves as a leading manufacturer of human-machine interface devices (control and...
Spotlight: Novus Automation
Novus Automation was established in 1982 as a Brazilian manufacturer of controllers and data acquisition instrumentation. With their headquarters in south Brazil, Novus maintains branch offices throughout the South American continent, North America and Hong Kong. The...
Have you heard what Patlite is doing?
Patlite released their new LR series last year and it has been well received in the market. This month they announced that they will be discontinuing a number of their current series so they can focus stock on the new LR series. LU5, LU5-U and LU5+FB200 will...
So, who is American Rotary anyway?
It's been almost a year since we started distributing American Rotary and Marshall Wolf is proud to announce we have been named their "Up and Coming Distributor of the Year." To celebrate, we were treated with a BBQ courtesy of Chris and the rest of his team from up...
A real down and dirty debate about VFDs vs Rotary Phase Converters
When trying to make an important decision, the first thing to do is a quick Google search which should give you every answer you could possibly want, right? This may be the case normally but when it comes to costly decisions such as which way is best to convert single...
BBQ with American Rotary!
We’re Getting Spoiled! American Rotary traveled a few hours south today with a trunk full of food and drinks for us! We are honored to be their ‘Up and Coming Dealer of the Year’ and look forward to living up to the title. The two Chris’s (ours and theirs) had a great...
Marshall Wolf Automation sponsors motorsports?
While it may not be a NASCAR sponsorship, Marshall Wolf Automation does happen to sponsor my drag racing team! You may be asking, "So what type of car or motorcycle do you race, Chris?" Well, neither to be honest...."Okay then, bicycle?" Nope, keep guessing... Give...
Happy Birthday and Happy Memorial Day!
Two announcements today! We're celebrating Ashley and Cindi's birthdays....and... Marshall Wolf Automation will be closed Memorial Day, May 29th, and will be back in the office on Tuesday, May 30th. Have a happy and safe Memorial Day holiday and we'll see you all...
What’s new and improved with Fuji’s PXF Temperature Controller?
For this post we wanted to compare Fuji's 'recently' launched PXF(4/5/9) series temperature controllers vs. the PXR & PXG series in a family feud. The goal here is to boil down the important improvements made between the generations seeing the PXR series was once...
Come to MWA…we have cookies!
We've been celebrating quite a bit lately at Marshall Wolf. Both Amy and Beckie recently celebrated their "29th" birthdays and our newest employee Lisa treated us with some delicious homemade cookies...aren't you jealous?
Wolfie’s headed out to the 2017 Bar-Z Bash!
We’ve got some cool news about our first sponsorship and attendance to the BAR-Z BASH 2017. What’s this you say? If any of our readers are the home hobbyist type, you may have heard of a cool cat out there in YouTube land by the name of Stan Zinkosky. Stan has his...
Why can’t an industrial SSR work in my car?
That’s a good question, why not? The fundamental reasons you’d think it would work are sound, so why don’t you see that happening? That’s because in our industrial world there are designs that work best for industrial applications and in the automotive industry there...
Why We Think The New Patlite LR Light Tower is So Cool!
Earlier this year Patlite released their new LR series; a fully modular LED signal tower line. The visibility is amazing! A new lens design gives you a more uniform, 360° light and more than doubles the light intensity of previous models. IP65 rating… even with a...
A big thank you to Exergen!
We wanted to extend our warmest thanks to Bob Harris over at Exergen for sending our two expecting mamas some very handy temporal thermometers. Beckie still uses her Exergen thermometer from Bob that she received during her first pregnancy...15 years...