Employee Spotlight: Meet Paul Touzinsky
Paul Touzinsky’s affinity for designing control panels circles back to a lifelong love of industrial art and design. “You have to have a certain amount of creativity to plan out panel designs,” he notes. “I have to think of the shop, the engineering and the end user.”
Paul has been a Control System Designer at UCEC since 1999. He is a graduate of the Denver Institute of Technology with an Associate’s degree in drafting and design. After graduation, he worked at Topro and then moved to UCEC. Prior to his career in electrical control panel systems, Paul worked in banking.
Paul is involved on the front end of the UCEC process. One of his jobs is to help Terry Engledow with quoting due to his familiarity with “pieces, parts and components.” With panel design, Paul usually starts with the wiring diagrams as a sort of “visual check,” as he calls it, often stopping to consider the radius of a cable or the cooling space around a certain instrument. Sometimes, consultations with Zach Fothergill and Garrod Massey take place out in the shop. Paul also must consider details such as: are replacement parts readily available where the panel will be located?
Paul Touzinsky
Sometimes, clients supply their own panel designs. But frequently, Paul’s talents are needed because the client does not have an engineer or the engineers are too busy with multiple projects. On occasion, there’s just an IO list to work from, so Paul will start with a pretty basic concept. The primary objective is to meet the customer’s needs with a clear, solid design.
“When I design a panel system,” Paul says, “I’m always thinking about the process and trying to make things as smooth as possible. If the guys in the shop have to play 10,000 questions, I am wasting their time.” Often, there are a few layers between Paul and the end user, such as the engineering firm that hired UCEC. In these cases, he tries to consider all parties, leaving detailed notes in the design for the UCEC shop team, if needed.
Paul has been married for ten years to Patti. He says he’s happiest "wrenching" on a bicycle; and last summer, enjoyed arranging rides with close friends. Most recently, he and Patti have completed a considerable landscaping project in their yard, erecting a retaining wall; turning over a huge section of yard; and planting a shade garden.