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Sawzalling holes in dock doors
Joining Base
Andy Ross left Tesla as Director of Battery Manufacturing Engineering and joined General Motors, and a week later Justin Lopas and Dino Sasaridis of Base called him. He joined Base in March 2025. Base canceled Gen 2 in April, signed a lease on the old Austin American-Statesman building in June, and got the keys in September. By March 2026, two production lines were running and Base batteries were in the field.
Beating the heat
The building was hot. The cooling tower hadn't been cycled in seven years, and a temporary retrofit would have cost around $1 million and taken seven months, for a factory Base planned to occupy for thirteen. So he called local rental companies and had chillers set down outside. The dock door openers were broken and expensive to fix, so the chillers went in front of the doors, and he and a manufacturing engineer cut holes in the doors with a Sawzall to feed ducting through. That first Friday he stayed until midnight with the rental crew, and by Monday nobody was dying of sweat.
Fixing the air system
The compressed air system got the same treatment. The leftover 1980s compressor system wouldn't run, so he bought the largest 120-volt compressors he could find at Tractor Supply and worked in the ceiling running pipe and dropping lines for the pilot systems. He calls these hacky redneck fixes. Most have since been replaced, now that the team has grown from four engineers to 134 people.
How do rented chillers cool a whole building?
A chiller cools water through a refrigeration cycle, then pumps that cold water through coils where fans blow air across it. The cooled air travels through ducting to wherever it is needed, which is why a hole in a door can feed a whole bay. Rental units are common for temporary cooling because they arrive on a truck and run within hours. Chiller capacity is measured in tons, and one ton equals 12,000 BTU of heat removed per hour.
What happens to a cooling tower left idle for years?
Water sitting in a tower grows scale, corrosion, and slimy biofilm, and the fill material that spreads the water can degrade. Restarting it typically means cleaning, repairs, and chemical treatment before it can run safely. Warm standing water also lets Legionella bacteria multiply, which is why towers need regular treatment. Legionella is named for the 1976 outbreak of Legionnaires' disease at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia.
Why do factories still run on compressed air?
Air tools are light, simple, and don't spark, so they are common on assembly floors. A compressor squeezes air into a tank, and pipes carry it to stations where it drives wrenches, clamps, and actuators. The US Department of Energy has noted that most of the electricity a compressor uses ends up as heat rather than as useful air pressure. Because of that, compressed air is often called the most expensive utility in a plant.
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