#28 – Phil Lundman and Henri Kinson

#28 – Phil Lundman and Henri Kinson

February 26th, 2026

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Angus: This is Everything is Somewhere, I’m Angus Stocking. My guests today are Phil Lundman and Henri Kinson of Petersen Products. Phil in particular is a longtime friend of mine, one of my earliest clients when I started writing about infrastructure companies commercially. Henri is a new friend I met recently when interviewing him about some interesting projects that I wrote case studies on.

Henri, Phil, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

Phil: Well, thank you for having us.

Henri: Yeah, it’s exciting to be here.

Angus: And Phil, you and I go back a ways.

Phil: Yeah, I don’t even remember when that started, but it’s a long time ago.

Angus: Very close, 20 years or so, a bit more. And I was, at the time, I didn’t know anything about inflatables or line stops and was glad to learn such an interesting product. Could you give us maybe a very brief overview of the company, what you offer? It’s a family company, I’m interested in that. Just, your…

…five or 10 minutes on why Petersen has such a tremendous contribution to infrastructure firms.

Phil: I mean, the company started, or the seed was planted, with a grandfather who immigrated from Denmark many, many years ago. And he started, made a little drain cleaning tool that’s not too far away from what we’re doing today. And then it got bigger and then they used it as an inflatable device, kind of like a…

…kind of like a balloon, and you fill it with water and make it any size you want to stop the flow in a pipeline. And we have pictures of it used in small pipes for clearing and flushing pipelines. And we also have a couple of pictures of him with a larger one that is inflated with water to stop the flow in a larger pipeline…

…in Milwaukee, because he started out in Milwaukee.

It kind of grew under his supervision, but then the Depression came and created all kinds of problems for a lot of people, but somehow or another, they were able to manage to get through it. And he died of, he had some strokes and then he died, and my grandmother kind of took it over for a while and then my father got involved and kind of bailed her out somewhat.

And then he kept it alive for as long as he was alive. And then he died and then I kind of took over and we just expanded what they were doing and we’re still doing inflatable devices. And we claim we can put more pressure on the inflatable fabric item than anybody else.

Phil: Of course, the inflation pressure relates to how much flow we could stop in a pipeline. Then we’ve made it so that you could put a plug into a pressurized pipeline and stop the flow in a pressurized pipeline, which was a big new innovation. I would say the whole thing was related to design–build…

…even from the beginning because it was more of a solution‑oriented company. Somebody’d call up and say, “I have a pipeline that’s got this pressure. How do you stop the flow?” or whatever. And then we would create a solution for that project. And once we created a solution for that project, it made a product that could be used in other projects and maybe not be so…

…specialized. So we ended up with some things on the shelf that are more standardized that people call up and say, “I’ve got a 24‑inch pipeline, I need to stop the flow.” And in many cases, we have something on the shelf that’ll do that. But I think our core business is still creating solutions where somebody calls and says, “I’ve got this problem…”

…and then we create a solution for it. So we say we’re really a solutions company. And even with pipelines and stopping the flow on a household‑type plumbing system, a lot of things are very similar. But we do mostly industrial, and industrial pipelines are all over the map. There’s a lot of different variations and the variations primarily are diameter…

…pressure, flow rate, temperature, chemical composition. And so we create a solution for those parameters. Right now we do about 25 or 30% of the solutions are for international. So, because we’ve been doing it for a while now, major pipeline contractors and engineers…

Phil: …know about our abilities and know that we’re a solutions provider. So they will call us up and say, “Hey, can you do this?” And then it gets a little bit wider, the bandwidth gets wider. And so it may be a pipeline that’s being plugged, but then something similar, they say, “Well, if you could do this, maybe you could do that.” So one of the projects we did was for…

…for NASA, as an example, it’s like a big bagel that’s inflatable. It can be used to squeeze a missile to see how much pressure the skin can handle without it collapsing. For them, we built some pods for a moon lander that they didn’t take to the moon, but they tested it here to drop…

…the moon lander on the ground and have the inflatable pods that we had on it break the fall so that it didn’t get damaged. And then there’s a thousand other items that people call and say, “Hey, can you do this?” And we generally say yes, if it’s either inflatable or mechanical.

Angus: Super interesting.

Angus: And that’s where Henri comes in. Henri, could you come in and tell us about what you do at Petersen, how long you’ve been doing it, and what day‑to‑day work is like for you?

Henri: Yeah, I’m a design engineer here at Petersen. I came on about three and a half years ago now. And I head up mostly the mechanical side of things, anything that has to do with steel or aluminum or any kind of materials like that, rather than the inflatables.

I’m sorry. Anyway, my day‑to‑day is filled up with… it’s more of a recent development for Petersen for us to be doing as much with mechanicals as we are doing now and on the scale that we’re doing them. And so I spend a lot of time iterating how we’re going to change stuff up. We just released a valve replacement tool line that we developed…

…taking a pretty standard‑style gripper plug and rigging it up just to make valve replacement easier, which is a job that takes a lot of time and a lot of finesse the way we were doing it.

Angus: And you and I first started chatting around a couple of super fascinating water treatment projects. And the first was Hanahan Water Treatment Plant in Charleston, excuse me. And one of the chief things that was interesting there was the sheer diameter.

Henri: Yeah, Charleston.

Angus: Tell us a little bit about that job, the specs you were working with and why it was so relatively unusual even for the custom work that you do. Is it, just curious, does it bring‑your‑dog‑to‑work day?

Henri: It is bring‑your‑dog‑to‑work day every day.

Yeah. So sorry about that.

Angus: It’s alright.

Henri: Yeah, no, that job was very interesting and a lot of fun. We, what happened is they were trying to block off an outflow in order to repair a baffle wall. And they had very little room to maneuver. And so they had to have, it was a seven‑foot‑diameter pipe and they had to be able to fold the bulkhead in half, float it down…

…a ways down the pipeline and then open it back up, which was pretty unique and fun. They just didn’t have much room to move around. So you had to make it open up like a, like a bifold door. And then, you know, the apparatus, the bulkhead itself, weighed a full ton and to be able to have guys with, you know, oxygen tanks and flippers be able to manage that…

…required another separate apparatus that bolted to it and allowed it to be operated. And so all that together, and making sure that the divers felt comfortable with it, was quite an operation.

Angus: And just to set the scene for listeners, this was deep underwater, think, as I recall, like 80 feet or so.

Henri: Yeah, we rated the plug for 20, so it was about 50 feet underwater that all of this was happening.

So they had to have special detox procedures and they ran on shifts to make sure that nobody was under for too long. It was, it was an operation by the dive guys. I did not envy them.

Angus: And so just out of curiosity, when you hire on as a design engineer, what was your training or what’s your degree in, I guess we could say? You’re a mechanical engineer or a structural or what’s a… how does that work out?

Henri: That’s, that’s also kind of funny. I am trained as a robotics engineer and hydraulics. And before working at Petersen, I was building houses. I had a construction company that I did. And Phil reached out to me through a recruiting service. I think it was Indeed. And…

Yeah, that’s, the rest is history, I guess.

Angus: And on this particular project, another thing that was very interesting to me was, was this the one where you had the dive team come to you for some pilot work in your yard there? Tell us about that. The dive team, when I interviewed them, described it as…

…kind of like being on a TV show, a reality show for fabrication. And I’m forgetting the exact show that they… Right there. Yeah, no, it was very like Mythbusters for them. Is that usual that you would have people on‑site doing…

Henri: Mythbusters, they have fire.

Angus: …testing of devices.

Henri: Yeah, we always invite customers. They’re always more than welcome to come. We give free training if anybody requires it.

Angus: Yeah. So training as much as custom fabrication is a big part of the job and just fascinating. Glad I was able to learn more about this. If we talk about, so the diameter was a big deal, the folding, and that was partly because they were working, the team had to take the…

…stop up into a narrow, relatively… well, let’s see, they were taking a round plug up into the pipe, going in about 30, 40 feet, maybe more, around a bend or two, and then installing it. And that was more or less impossible if they couldn’t have made it much smaller. And so you came up with the folding mechanism.

How novel was that? Is that something you had done before in similar projects or was that fairly new?

Henri: Petersen had definitely done folding bulkheads before. Not quite on that scale, but I would say we probably do one or two a year. It’s not crazy common, but it’s definitely needed sometimes. And it’s usually the access port, not actually the travel, that precludes you from having full diameter, but it’s a nice trick to have.

We figured out how to do it pretty well.

Angus: And then as I recall, there was a winch mechanism too, and that was mainly due to the weight. I mean, even underwater when you got some offsetting buoyancy. How much did half of the… that was being winched into place, how much weight are we talking there?

Henri: Yeah, I mean the full assembly was almost 2,000 pounds, so just the part that swung open was 1,000.

Angus: And so just for, to do that safely or to do it at all, some serious mechanical advantage was needed. And you supplied that with a hand‑crank winch.

Henri: Yeah, we got some boat winches, some stainless steel boat winches for like a boat trailer and bolted it to the front. Then we used, there were locking bars, like a door‑stop lock, that helped to make sure that everything stayed tight and actuated once it was in place. But we used those as cantilever arms…

…to get the kind of advantage that we needed. It… it was a winch–pulley system. It had three winches. And one of them was attached to a strong‑back for the final opening.

Angus: And how did it all work out? When you got feedback from the clients and the dive team, were you happy with the performance and was everyone involved… I mean, everyone I talked to was just over the moon with how such a critical project came off so well. Because for Hanahan, the water treatment plant, this was brand new. And for their engineers of record, this was entirely new territory for them.

Henri: Yeah, I mean, you know, after they get the product and everything’s open and installed, you don’t really hear… no news is always good news. But I do remember that it took a while to hear back ‘cause they had to do it a couple of times and it was installed for something like six months. So it was a while before they came back and said, “Hey…”

“Here’s everything,” sent us pictures. Yeah, they were happy with how it turned out in the end after a couple of hiccups.

Angus: Yeah, I remember, again, talking to the engineers and the plant operator. They were throwing around figures like millions of dollars of infrastructure at stake. I mean, had it gone wrong, it would have been expensive and a big deal. So congratulations on a great project. So that’s what I know about. Maybe you could tell us a story of a…

…from your long experience there, what was, what’s an amazing project that you’ve worked on that I haven’t heard about yet?

Henri: Well, I think the NASA one, that one was a lot of fun and that was right when I started. You know, Phil had kind of mentioned it earlier. We made a very large donut balloon, along with a nose cone, to apply stresses to a rocket fuselage, to make sure that it could handle the kind of loads that it was going to be under, to stress‑test it. And that was 30‑foot in diameter. I mean, it was huge. It was probably eight or nine feet tall. I mean, it was monstrous.

Angus: And that’s like the opposite of what you’re normally doing. We’re trying to expand outward and create a seal. In this case, you were stress‑testing implosion, basically. Do I have that right? Am I visualizing that correctly?

Henri: Yeah, no, that’s exactly what we did. And then we did it a couple of times afterwards for another company, which I cannot remember if we’re still bound by NDA, but we did it for another missile‑making company a little bit afterwards. Same kind of thing. Made them a couple of assemblies. But yeah, you get into weird, some weird stuff when you do, you know, high‑tech inflatables.

Angus: I know I’ve written case studies for Petersen in the past about dive platform work.

I might have.

Angus: I’ve muted it on my end because there’s quite a bit of breath coming through. But Phil, go, I’m sorry, Phil, to cut you off there.

Phil: I was going to say, you know, some time ago we built a mechanical inflatable device to stand up a missile on a trailer. You know, the missile’s laying down horizontally and then they drive it to where they wanted to blast it off and then they could stand it up vertically before blasting it off. We did that for Northrop… Northrop Grumman, I think. And…

I guess there’s a whole bunch of things. We did a mechanical plug once for one of the oil companies where it had to snake through a bunch of elbows on an offshore platform and get to a certain point and block the flow. And it was pretty high pressure. Another one that’s kind of interesting is off of Newfoundland that, they had a platform that…

…had a rubber seal around the outside. I think it was something like…

…20 feet in diameter or something like that. The seal was six‑inch‑diameter inflatable, but it was rubber and it was leaking. And so we had to build a… we built a bladder that they could snake inside it through a one‑inch hole and put it inside and inflate it to keep the bladder, the rubber bladder, inflated. And it was a…

…it was an offshore platform that was responsible for bringing in a high percentage of Newfoundland’s energy, but it worked and it’s still out there. I believe it’s still out there and it’s still staying inflated and staying floated.

Angus: You know, one thing interesting about all that is I was quite aware of Petersen supplying infrastructure stops and dive platforms and dams.

Phil: High‑lifts.

Angus: Right. But you’re saying that you’re doing quite a bit in aerospace and even military contracting and that’s a long way away from the first plugs that were made for commercial plumbing use. Congratulations.

Henri: Yeah, we have a good time with it.

Phil: It’s mechanical or inflatable and a lot of it is designed around pipeline and pipeline‑type configurations. It may not be a pipeline, but it’s got a similar configuration.

Angus: Henri, can I ask, what sort of software solutions are you working with? What’s fabrication look like? It must be… your machining must be pretty sophisticated, right? And there’s, I assume there’s some 3D printing maybe. Are you like tooled up NASA‑equivalent?

Henri: Not… we’re getting slowly but surely. No, we mostly just use SolidWorks for all our modeling and all of our simulations. We have a good‑size machine shop. We just got a brand‑new half‑a‑million‑dollar dual mill‑and‑lathe machine, which has been doing wonders for us. It’s a beautiful piece of equipment.

Angus: Quite.

Henri: But for all the big stuff, we have lots of contractors that we work closely with. And they’re very, very good to us. There’s a place out of Mequon that we work with, Snyder Mold Company. And they have some big heavy‑duty machines. They can mill stuff that’s eight‑foot in diameter. Some big machines.

Phil: And we do 3D printing. And we probably have more work centers than most companies our size. So we can do 3D printing, we do vulcanizing, we do welding, we do CNC metal, we do CNC fabric. The CNC machines mark the fabric where you can sew it and also cut it to different patterns.

Henri: Now they cut the straps for us. Got the CNC strap cutter.

Phil: A strap cutter and, you know, sewing straps, you know, automatically. So we can do a lot of stuff and we… you know, he said we have a pretty well‑equipped machine shop and we, I mean, we don’t run like a normal company and a lot of our equipment is not… we don’t run 24/7…

…and it’s not high production. So we may spend as much time programming our equipment as we do running it. And we may make a mold for a single item and mold it, you know, just one item, but we’ll make the mold and we’ll mold it on our molding machine. And so we do a lot of short‑run stuff. It’s really design–build. We don’t make anything for anybody else. I mean, everything that we have here is something that…

…relates to a solution for one of our customers. The customers call up and say, “I need this.” And so then we do it. And because we can do the short run, can build one, you know, we can take an order for one. We’re kind of unique in the industry.

Angus: It sounds interesting, fascinating really. I guess as we wrap up here, one more question that occurred to me, Henri, is testing — how do you certify before you ship? There’s a lot at risk. Do you work with third‑party engineers or do your own testing? I mean, it sounds like…

…risky business, period. I mean you have to be sure that this thing is going to work under pressure — literal pressure. Is it a little scary at times or do you feel the, you know, anxiety before you ship? Or how do you mitigate anxiety, I guess we could say?

Henri: We experience it usually a couple of weeks beforehand. We put them in tests ourselves. Everything that leaves the building gets stress‑tested, and to varying degrees.

Phil: Actually, we have a separate building for testing for the high‑pressure, the big and high‑pressure things, to keep the testing out of our main building, partly for safety reasons, partly because it just works better to have a unique test facility.

Henri: Dedicated. But yeah, I mean, even the project that we talked about, that seven‑foot diameter, we grabbed it… we made two of them. So we had a clock‑face‑looking fixture and loaded both the plugs in there and tested them back to back. And at the time, depending, but at least for that project, we had a 2x safety‑factor requirement. We put, you know, it’s planned to be used at 20. Take it to 40.

And so we get to… the engineers usually get to sweat it out themselves to make sure that nobody’s at risk. Like that project, we sat on top of that thing and torqued all 56 bolts, God only knows how many times. But we get to sweat it out personally so that there’s no doubt when it leaves the building.

Phil: We have product‑liability insurance, but we’ve never had to use it.

Angus: I’m glad I asked. That’s an interesting…

…some fabricators even don’t face that level of testing and scrutiny and stakes. And just to be clear, when you say 40 versus 20, we’re talking PSI, right?

Henri: Yes, yeah. So that one was rated to go for 50‑foot of head. So we took it to 100‑foot of head.

Angus: Super. I sure appreciate your time, Phil and Henri. This has been fantastic. Phil, any closing thoughts on the state of the industry or where you might be heading in the future? And Henri, too, is there any changes that you’re anticipating coming up in your fabrication work?

Phil: I don’t think there’ll be an end in solutions that are required and people keep calling us and I think it gets to be more and more sophisticated and we become more and more sophisticated. And as he said, you know, we have bought this new machining center so we can do more precision work and even testing. Our customers are pushing us all the time to become more competent in everything that we do because they set the requirements higher and higher.

We just recently had something, the finished surface wasn’t quite right on something we did. And we’ve never had that problem. We said, well, it’s pretty good. But then they decided they wanted a different finished surface. So we developed the capability of checking finished surfaces. And that’s just one example of how our customers keep pushing us. And as they push us, then we develop…

…the capacity to do what they want us to do.

Angus: Great, thank you. And Henri, anything to add to that?

Henri: No, it just continues to get bigger and weirder. And that’s fun for us.

Angus: Thanks for listening to this 28th episode of Everything is Somewhere. It was a pleasure for me to speak to an old friend doing amazing work in civil infrastructure. I hope that you liked it as well.

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