MT Magazine July/August 2024

FEATURE STORY

THE IMTS ISSUE

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Disassembling the existing exhibits wasn’t an option. Eelman recalls his team, the exhibitor, contractors, safety personnel, and others scrambling to figure out how to get it where it needed to be. “We finally came up with a plan to put it on a big lift truck and to elevate it so we could move it through the hall.” At one point in the middle of the night, Eelman looked out his office window overlooking the floor of the hall and saw the massive machine seemingly floating down the aisles above the other machines and exhibits. It was slow moving. It took all night to get in position. When neighboring exhibitors arrived the next morning, they were astonished at the sight of the massive machine having apparently teleported in their midst overnight by magic. Organized Magic “Astonished” is a good word for what Eelman hopes people will feel at IMTS 2024, which will be his last. Eelman is retiring.

EELMAN'S FAVORITE SHOW

With 13 IMTS shows behind him, people often ask Peter Eelman, chief experience officer for AMT, the owner and producer of IMTS, which one is his most memorable. After some considered hesitation, he responds, “I think the 2014 show with the Strati is my favorite because everything culminated there.” While Eelman and his team had established the Emerging Technology Center a decade before, and the show floor had long been organized into a collection of pavilions (now sectors), they wanted to do something different for 2014. Enter: The Strati The concept was simple enough. They would 3D print a car on the floor of IMTS. No one had seen anything like that – anywhere. AMT worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Local Motors, and a crew of dedicated people. They not only planned to have it printed on the floor of IMTS 2014, but they would drive it out of McCormick Place. “It could have been a disaster,” Eelman admits. It had never been done before. Not at ORNL. Not at Local Motors. Nowhere. They couldn’t even do a practice run. Whether it could be done in time was a big unknown. They weren’t even 100% confident they could print the structure without some snafu. But they started the process. It drew interest from attendees. It drew interest from exhibitors. It drew interest from people outside the manufacturing community as news outlets came to McCormick Place and covered it – it was even featured on the “Today” show. The Strati was printed. Fitted with a powertrain and suspension and driven out of McCormick Place as planned. IMTS 2024 will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Strati with a special exhibit with the car and an IMTS+ Main Stage conversation with the participants of the remarkable undertaking that made IMTS 2014 so special.

Peter Eelman attended IMTS in 1980 as an exhibitor. In 1996 he joined AMT and has been running the biennial show ever since. 2024 will be his last show as chief experience officer for AMT, as he is retiring. Odds are that this show will be extraordinary.

He considered retiring after IMTS 2018, which would have been an absolute mic-drop moment, as it was a record breaker by all metrics: 129,415 people registered. There were 2,123 booths and 2,563 exhibitors covering 1.4 million square feet. But he stayed on. And then 2020 happened. And IMTS didn’t. Eelman decided to make sure IMTS got back on a typical schedule. He’d spent most of his career making sure that the show went off without a hitch, and he wanted to leave that as his legacy. IMTS 2022 was a success. And when we spoke with Eelman at the start of this summer, he and his team were hard at work organizing September’s event. “We’re now back on a normal show cycle,” he says. “The routine is back.” Eelman recalls that early in his position, after an IMTS was completed and his team had some time to decompress, he would call them into a meeting. “I would have a stack of floor plans from the show and then rip them up in front of them. I wanted to make it clear that in two years we would do a different show.” He admits that was a bit dramatic. But it worked. Although he says the routine is back, there is nothing routine about the experience of IMTS – regardless of the year.

If you have any questions about this information, please contact Gary at vasilash@gmail.com.