Alum treasures being a piece of Ohio Stadium history
“It just makes Buckeye football games that much more interesting, not that they needed help,” Dixon (’81) said. “Feeling a part of it is special, especially having gone to every game I could while I was there and while growing up as a kid on the east side of Columbus.”
He estimates that the company—Advanced Cutting Technologies (ADCUT)—has cut the lettering and specialty numbers for nearly 800 synthetic turf fields. ADCUT, which Dixon founded in 1994 with his wife Chris, specializes in providing waterjet cutting services for a range of materials, including turf, carpet, stone and various types of flooring.
Dixon asked for the Ohio Stadium job after their first summer of working with company Field Turf on field replacement projects.
“We knew Ohio State was getting a new field, so we told them we were Buckeyes and we wanted to do it,” Dixon said. “They ended up letting us do that field in May 2007 and again in May 2014.”
For turf projects, ADCUT uses a computer-controlled stream of 50,000 PSI high-pressure water, running at twice the speed of sound, to cut each piece of colored turf needed in a design. Once cut, the pieces are reassembled in their North Carolina facility before being shipped to the field for installation.
For the Ohio State project, Dixon explained, the company had a lot of volunteer interest.
“We have an alumni club here in the Pinehurst area with close to 200 members,” he said. “We had several members come down and help us on the field so they could put their initials on the back.”
Dixon launched ADCUT out of the need to find a job he enjoyed. Plus, he had previous experience with waterjet cutting from his work for companies such as Rockwell International. It’s a niche industry, he explained, but it provides the sense of accomplishment that attracted him to engineering in the first place.
“I like building stuff. I like to see that I accomplished something,” Dixon said. “Engineering allows you to solve problems and get immediate feedback on how you’re doing.”
But he wasn’t sure if he really wanted to be an engineer when he enrolled at Ohio State.
“My dad was a civil engineer and I remember asking him if I went for four years of college in engineering, and then ended up going into business, would I have wasted my time? And he said no,” Dixon said. “It turned out I liked the engineering though.”
One of the key things his Ohio State education provided, Dixon shared, is the ability to solve problems, regardless of whether they were technical or not.
“It’s an ability to solve something even when you don’t know anything about it. It’s the ability to analyze and get resources to try to solve a problem,” he said.
During his days as a Buckeye engineering student Dixon never would have guessed that one day his initials would be in centerfield, written behind the Block O. But he treasures the knowledge that he’s a piece of Ohio Stadium history.
Written by Candi Clevenger, College of Engineering Communications, clevenger.87@osu.edu
