After working at J&L for five years, and learning their procedures and practices, it was quite a shock to learn that I knew nothing. But that was basically what happened when I was sent to work for our parent company, Waterbury-Farrel, after the strike was over. Their standards and processes where completely different than J&L. But this was not a unique situation, as I learned later in my career. Every company evolves on its own, with its own way of doing things, the manufacturing methods, the engineering standards. Its not a matter of who is right and who is wrong, although I did think along those lines as a young engineer. It wasn’t until fairly recently (in the last fifty years or so) that some “National” standards for manufacturing have appeared (I.E. in the early years of the automobile, there were no standards for screw threads, and each car manufacturer had their own ideas concerning the nuts and bolts that held the car together. It was not uncommon to see oddball threads such as 1/4-14 or 9/16-28, but as the fastener industry grew, these variations evolved into what we see today).

Living out of a motel in Waterbury, Connecticut, thru the winter of 1970-71, was a unique experience. If I remember right, the winter weather consisted of either wet snow or freezing rain (kind of like what we are getting in Vermont now). The town of Cheshire contracted out a lot of their snowplowing, and it was not uncommon to see garbage trucks with plows. We stayed at a place called The Red Bull, on top of a hill not too far from I84. We spent four nights a week there, travelling back and forth from Vermont on Mondays and Fridays. The product line at Waterbury-Farrel was completely different than what any of us was used to; they designed and built hot and cold forming machinery, basically stamping machines of various sizes. Forging machinery. From small units that may stamp out electrical contacts in silver, to multi-ton capacity machines for large forgings. At the time they were building some multi-station machines that took a chunk of brass and progressively stamped it out into a bullet casing. A lathe-like device at the end would machine an ejection groove to complete the item.

The engineering department at Waterbury-Farrel was set up similar to J&L in that they had rows of drafting tables in a large room. This was before computer aided drafting (CAD) was in existence. Design work was done with pencil and eraser, on large sheets of vellum (a high grade of paper used for drafting work). They had dedicated crew of checkers, and we found out soon enough that our way of drawing would have to change to conform to their “standards”. Our job was basically one of “detailers”, to take their assembly layouts and draw up every single part so that it could be manufactured. But our methods and dimensioning approach had to bend to conform to their standards. It was, in some ways, a painful four months.