ISIS Enterprises was my first company and a partnership with Marcia Sauser. She a graphic and fine artist, I a developer and engineer, together we joined our energies to produce some very unusual and often beautiful products, combining technology and art in a variety of ways.

Guitar Slide label, 1974

Business Card Art

Brochure Cover 1974

I had been working as an apprentice to the glassblower at Research Instrument Service at the University of Oregon Medical School while she completed her Senior year at Portland State University. Our next door neighbor was a guitar player. One day he asked if I could make a glass tube fit his finger like the neck of a bottle, which was very fragile. He had broken the bottleneck he used with his guitar.  I made one using Pyrex (borosilicate glass) and thus was born ISIS Enterprises, manufacturers of Pyrex Glass Guitar Slides. Over the course of the following two years we manufactured many thousands of them, selling in countries all over the world (Denmark, Mexico, Japan, New Zealand). I had  fourteen workers by the fall of 1973, and we were buying our glass tubing by the truckload. Guitar player magazine featured our product; the 'big ten' music distributors of the US began ordering 12,000 at a time; we had two work shifts in a facility in the basement of a boat factory we lived above- but that's another story.

Custom artwork, 1974 NAMM Convention brochure, Los Angeles, CA

The guitar slide market ended when in the Winter of 1973 president Nixon announced an 'inventory crisis' in the economy, and sure enough, all of our distributors had quit buying more than one month's product at a time. In a search for an alternative product to be sold into our amazing distribution channel,  I designed a digital sequencer which toggled a sound effects generator. 

After three design cycles and in the face of diminishing guitar slide sales, I discontinued it's development.

We called it  "The Woods Walker" I don't recall why. It plugged into a guitar amp and made sounds no-one has heard before or since. Each time it played, it's sound was unique- and *very* 'spacey'.

In this process of it's creation, I had developed the tools and techniques I needed to design and etch my own circuit boards.

My partner suggested we screen print and etch art/design instead of electronic circuits, frame and enamel them. ISIS Enterprises was back in business by Spring, selling copper hang-ups to furniture stores on the West Coast from Bellingham to San Francisco.

With about 50 designs on silk and another 50 in the works, we learned that in order to break into the 'Furniture Mart' level of wall decor marketing and distribution, distributors needed about 300 designs to include our company as a viable offering), and we lost our lease when the boat company began to get going and needed the space we occupied. Faced with thousands of dollars in ramp-up costs and a relocation to a 'chemically friendly' new facility, it was a no-brainer when Olympic Instruments walked in our door about a week prior to it's permanent close, and asked, "What would it take to get you to come to work for us?".

We talked. I went to work for them for $6.00 an hour (hard to believe, today), and I brought my circuit board production stuff with me.