INTERVIEW Speaking to The Thermal Guys at the
Engineering Design Show in Coventry In the Coventry Building Society Arena it was diffi cult not to be drawn towards The Thermal Guys stand. With their live displays of thermal cameras, including one which not only highlighted the heat coming from passers by but also showed them in sharp focus and detail, and their robotic dog, Below is the transcript from our video interview with Matthew Clavey, MD, The Thermal Guys which is available to watch now on the EFE website or the Connecting Industries YouTube channel. Interview Conducted by Samuel Jones
Q: Who are The Thermal Guys?
Matthew : We provide thermal imaging cameras and really, it’s kind of a quite a niche product, really. So what we fi nd, what we struggle with is during the day, engineers are very busy, you know, and we, have LinkedIn, social accounts and things, but obviously during the day, it’s very diffi cult to see them. So what we thought is actually let’s do the fun side of things and when the engineers go home, maybe they relax, look at a little bit of YouTube or whatever, they might stumble across us, hopefully that maybe they follow us and they’ll see how we use the cameras and kind of go, you know what? I’ve got a program, something like that, that maybe I could use it at work.
So maybe it’s a more entertaining, social, soft way of getting in contact with engineers where we struggle during the day. One of the cool things is I’ve actually been doing this for about 15 years. So I’ve, worked with a lot of engineers and a lot of engineers know me already. I think what’s quite cool is thermal guys just adds another fun layer to what we’re doing. We’ve got 10,000 followers, on LinkedIn, I have 7000 followers. So potentially 17,000 followers. So as we introduce a new bit of tech, a new bit of software, it can go out to that audience and then hopefully the dream is that someone might see that and go, oh, actually Bob down the road, he’s had a problem. Maybe it could be useful for him and I think probably that’s probably how media, social media works, isn’t it?
Q: So who are the videos you make aimed at?
Matthew: Maybe it’s not you directly, but it could be a colleague that you’re working with who could help. So we’re trying lots of different things. But yeah, hopefully the message is
getting out there slowly but surely. But what we try and do really is what we would love to do is application stories. So, you know, a client that has a camera, the downside is 95 per cent of my customers are NDAs. I can never talk about it and it’s kind of like, yeah, I’ll speak to a new customer and they’ll kind of go, oh, can you use a camera for this? Yes. Can you show me? No. And you know, and it’s so diffi cult.
Q: You’ve done some interesting things with these cameras, what’s the craziest thing you’ve done?
Matthew: If we talk about the maddest things I’ve done many, many years ago, not long after I started, I did some work at the National Veterinary Centre, and they have, like a running treadmill, but they had a racehorse on that, and I fi lmed a racehorse from trot to gallop, and it was just amazing. And you could see the muscles warming up, and then you could see cooling as they cooled down. Other stuff, I can’t say because of NDAs. But I’ve done target tracking on jets fl ying past at Mach one. I’ve done ballistics
work, I’ve fi lmed explosions, I’ve imaged volcanoes. I mean, yeah, you name it, I’ve done it, but I just can’t always show you it. But the coolest thing is, is we’re showing you something that you can’t see with your eyes, and it just opens up a whole new world.
Q: What is coming next for The Thermal Guys?
Matthew: Well, you know, we have Halloween and Christmas coming up, so expect some really spooky Halloween type video. And we are doing, a Christmas movie, that sounds grander than it is, it’s going to be like three minutes, but, you know, hey, there’s only like three of us, so whatever.
Yeah. Halloween and Christmas movies look forward to it.
You can watch our interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/@ ConnectingIndustryTV And The Thermal Guys here: https://www.
youtube.com/@TheThermalGuys
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