Of all the new expensive gadgets and working space, Justin Dillon’s favorite piece of new equipment may be a sink.

BasX Solutions, one of Redmond’s top employers, finished construction of its 36,000-square-foot welding shop where employees will build cooling and HVAC systems for data centers, classrooms and more.

That favored piece of equipment — the sink — reminds Dillon, BasX’s senior supervisor of welding, of elementary school, where you could push a pedal with your foot to get the faucet running.

“These guys, they work hard and get dirty, man, and so I’ll do anything I can to help them stay clean before they go in the break room or go home,” Dillon said.

BasX cut the ribbon on their upgraded facility Sept. 18, with CEO and co-founder Dave Benson and Redmond Mayor Ed Fitch in attendance.

In addition to adding more space, the weld shop also has a new tube laser and specialized saw. The new facility made the workspace more comfortable for employees and includes relatively small pieces, like a track for rolling equipment across the shop floor and electrical outlets that run cords underground to reduce tripping hazards.

“(Designers are) starting to include the employees, the people who live it, eat and breathe it. They’re starting to ask them, ‘Hey, how would you do this?’ We’re telling them and they’re listening,” said Dillon. “They left it up to me to design this entire thing.”

Those design tips from employers went into decisions on where the doors would be located and how the tall the ceiling would be.

BasX employs 800 people in Redmond and they are expected to add 200 more jobs by the end of the year, according to Benson.

There is still more construction work to be done, however, before the weld shop is operating at full capacity. That is expect to wrap up by November or December. That includes a robotic welding machine built by AGT Robotics.

The robot is 90 feet long with a long arm that take photographs and analyzes exactly what it needs to weld. The crew will place the base of whatever they’re working on in the robot, which will rotate the equipment like a “rotisserie chicken,” Dillon said.

“A cool thing was that they sent me to Chicago and I was able to go to (a) convention and they had the latest and greatest welding … I mean everything you could think of,” said Dillon. “I was just a kid in a candy store.”

The BLOX 500 from AGT Robotics was Dillon’s first choice, as everything else seemed too “geeky,” he said.