The rebuilding of the Fellows cold former took us close to two years. As I said, it was a massive project. Along with rebuilding the main mechanisms, we fitted the machine with a custom designed overhead gantry loader, one that had (4) sets of gripping fingers; two sets handled the blanks going into the machine, two sets took the finished gun barrels and deposited them in an unloading tray. Even though the machine was called a “cold former”, you didn’t want to touch the parts when they came out- they were HOT!!

I think in the end there were (9) separate axes to control on the machine, three on the loader, and six on the machine. A new Siemens CNC control was used to tie everything together. Because we ran over our promised delivery time, it was decided to allow the customer to run the machine in production at our facility, as they needed to build up their inventory. If I remember right, they even worked two shifts for a while, and tried not to run during the day, as it was a very noisy process which affected our other personnel.

Winchester had (3) of these Fellows cold formers in New Haven; there was talk about rebuilding another one down the road, but it never panned out. It wasn’t too many years before they were bought out by FN Armament of Belgium; eventually the New Haven plant was closed and everything was moved to South Carolina.

Along about the mid 90’s we got involved with the machine tool builder Cincinnatti-Milacron on the building of a small grinder. Craig wanted to get out of the rebuilding business, and hoped that this ex-Heald machine would allow him to become an “OEM” (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Heald (in Massachusetts) had gone out of business, and had been bought out by Cincinnatti-Milacron in Ohio. This Heald product had been discontinued, but perhaps, with help, we could resurrect it. We got all the drawings and assembly procedures, and started to have the parts made locally. It took us quite a while to get the machine built and running, and by the time we had it right, an opportunity was presented to us…………

The automotive company Delphi was looking to purchase several small grinders to grind automotive valve lifters, and our ex-Heald machine was a suitable candidate. But so were the grinders built across town at Bryant. So a bidding war was on to get this contract. I think that Delphi’s final decision was based on the fact that Bryant was a long-time, experienced grinder manufacturer, and we were not. Eventually, Bryant got the job, but because they had to “lowball” the price to beat us, they had problems delivering the full order. I believe that when we bought Bryant out of bankruptcy, there were a few of these machines left to build; we ended up doing just that.