In the early 80’s we had a significant member of our engineering team retire. Harold Noyes had been with the company for many years, working his way up thru the ranks like we all did. His position when he retired was as the Engineering Lead Man for the TNC lathe product line. I had been a member of this department for quite a long time, and had advanced to the position of Senior Design Engineer, so I was asked if I would like the Lead Man position. Because I was familiar with our people, and product line, and had worked closely with the other department heads, I accepted.

The Engineering Lead Man position was basically as an assistant to the TNC lathe engineering manager. At the time this was Dave Keniston, who had held this position for several years, being promoted in from the programming department. Dave had been my boss right along, so this was nothing new. Basically, my job would entail reviewing all projects that were entered into the TNC lathe department, and sitting down with Dave to go thru time estimates for each. Then we would prioritize these jobs, and pick who we thought would be able to tackle the actual design work. Dave had a wall mounted chart in his office that we used to list all our available people and their workload. We had perhaps eight or ten engineers on staff at this time, each one having certain talents that might fit the task at hand. Sometimes these folks were busy working on other projects, and it might be a few weeks before they could “take hold” of a new assignment. In that case, I might do some preliminary groundwork to give them a “head start” when they finally were available. I might even be able to pick off little pieces of these jobs, do the layout and design work, and release them to manufacturing. This was especially important if there were any long-lead items that had to be ordered (“long lead” meaning things that take a long time to obtain).

When I refer to “releasing items for manufacture”, I should describe just how we did this at J&L. Our machinery was built using a multi-page “machine writeup”, which listed all the sub-assemblies needed to create a full blown machine. These basic sub-assembly lists were written, as an example, starting with the machine base (or bed) as “A-12345 Machine Base”, and this list would include all the parts necessary to build a base. Following this on the machine writeup would be all the other sub-assemblies, both mechanical and electrical, until the build list was complete. There were many “standard” sub-assemblies already in existence, enough to build any “standard” TNC lathe; no engineering involvement was necessary. But the orders that did find their way to my desk involved some special element; it may just be a customer specification for a different limit switch brand. So we may have to do some design work to fit these in, and write and issue a new sub-assembly list to get them on order. But most of our work involved much more complicated items then that.