It was late winter 1971, and our work at Waterbury-Farrel was done. We returned to J&L and the jobs we held at the end of the strike. All three of us were still employed, which was in contrast to some of our friends who had been laid off. I returned to the grinder engineering group, and slowly got back up to speed. I still had my window seat, but because it was still winter out, the window stayed closed. We had a few customer orders, so I busied myself with the items that needed to be specified and ordered. But it was not a busy time, and the days seemed to drag on thru early spring.

The pace was definitely faster over in the lathe engineering area. The man who was responsible for documenting all the lathe tooling had been transferred to the sales area. Howard Haubrich was an outgoing and friendly guy who had the abilities needed to be a salesman, and he did a fine job. I was asked if I would like to be his replacement, and I accepted. The job entailed keeping track of all the tooling required for any lathe application. There was a multi-sheet master drawing that charted all the “square shank” turning tools, and also boring bars. The major suppliers of these items included companies such as Kennametal, GE-Coromant, Valenite, and Sandvik, among others. There were other lesser-known suppliers of specialty tools, also. My job was to keep all our records up-to-date so that the folks who handled the customer runoffs had the dimensional data necessary to do their jobs. All the TNC lathes were required to pass an accuracy check after the machine was built. We had what we called a “standard test piece” which the lathe was required to machine to a certain accuracy; this included straight cuts, contours, threading and boring.

Sometimes the standard test piece was all that was required to pass customer muster, and then the machine was skidded and shipped. But quite often the customer would have his own parts that had to be used for machine acceptance. Sometimes this could lead to tensions between “us and them”, especially when we discovered that the machining process of these parts had never been done by the customer. We were in effect providing this service for free. And this could take a significant amount of time (and money). Quite often the customer realized this, and we would negotiate some “additional charges” to help cover our costs. But it was often a hassle. A “pi**ing contest”. But we were usually at a disadvantage, as we wanted to ship product (and bill the customer).

As mentioned earlier, we had three or four major tool suppliers who were vying for our business. They had a very visible presence in the Halls Of Power (the front offices), and when lunch time came around, there were not many managers who had to pay for their own lunch. It is kind of like any government office, and these people were similar to lobbyists who were trying to advance their product. Of course, our customers quite often had a preference for which brand of tooling was used. In that case it was already decided.