The Bryant “intellectual property” referred to earlier also included all the electronic drawing files. But the computer drafting system that Bryant used to generate these was different than what we used. This would become quite a nuisance in the future; nobody on board had the training to be able to access these drawings as changes became necessary. And converting these drawings to our version of AutoCad was unworkable. Our only hope was to hire a Bryant engineer who knew how to work with these files. In the end, this is what we did, and that proved to be a workable solution, although not ideal.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but quite a lot of the physical inventory was worthless; spare parts for obsolete machines. Parts that were not marketable at all. But useful for accounting purposes (I.E. if you claim $2 million in spare parts inventory, that can be used as collateral for a loan). The bank really wouldn’t know just how worthless these parts were. The same goes for the wooden patterns we inherited. Mostly worthless, and even worse: they were considered “hazardous material”, and could not be easily disposed of. But the partially built grinders we got turned out to be quite profitable for us. Most of these were already sold, and all we had to do was finish the build, runoff, and ship. With the help of our new Bryant employees, we all received a nice profit sharing check from this. It would be the last one, though.

When we took control of the Bryant brand, little did we know that it had already been tarnished from poor service and support from its previous owners; because of that, many of the “faithful” Bryant customers had already found other sources for their grinding machines. Also, in retrospect, we did not fully advertise that Bryant was still a viable brand. We heard comments many times in the coming months that folks did not realize that Bryant was still alive. But to be perfectly honest, we couldn’t hope to be able to bring this famous line of machines back; we didn’t have the machinery necessary to fabricate many of the “fussy” parts of the grinder. We had a very difficult time getting outside vendors to quote on some of the drawings. The specialty machines that Bryant had used to make these parts had been scrapped. As a result, we spent many engineering hours redesigning these same parts so they could be made by the local machine shops.

At one point, after reviewing some of the Bryant drawings, it was suggested that we do a “cost analysis” of each of the major items. On the surface, it appeared that there were many cases of excessively tolerance parts (I.E. the tighter the tolerance, the costlier the part is to make). But we didn’t have the manpower to do this. In the end, it was agreed that the Bryant machine had a good reputation in the field, and these close tolerances must have had something to do with that reputation.