It was apparent almost from the beginning that the task before us would be daunting. As mentioned earlier, we discovered that the “List of Customers” we had received as part of the buyout contained many dead-ends; mostly disgruntled customers who had already found other sources for their machinery. We did try to make contact with some of these folks, but our sales force consisted of only one person. Craig did make many trips (usually accompanied by our Operations Manager) to try to build up some sort of listing of possible customers. In the meantime we were busy rebuilding old machinery and also creating a “Bryant” product line. We picked the smaller machines to quote, and seemed to sell a few. But the incoming orders were not encouraging. A lot of the Bryant parts were proving to be difficult to get quotes on (we made very few parts in-house). This was especially true of parts for high speed wheelheads. We initiated a redesign program to allow our vendors to build the parts necessary to be successful. But, being novices in this field, it seemed that every design change brought heartache; some of the completed spindles would only run a few hours before failure. Even worse, some failed in the customers plant. It was beginning to look like this would be a long, expensive road.

On the bright side, we did have a very lucrative Bryant spare parts business. Especially if we sold parts we already had as part of the buyout. But we did have the Bryant drawings and microfilms, so if we didn’t have the actual part, we could (hopefully) have it made locally.

The Bryant mechanics we hired for assembly floor work got a culture shock when they came on board; being only involved with building Bryant product, it took some of them a while to readjust to our methods (especially in the rebuilding of old machines). Building a new machine is NOT the same as rebuilding old machinery (although our Operations Manager insisted it was). There were certain guildlines that had to be followed during teardown and cleaning, to prevent problems from cropping up when it came time to reassemble (we had a detailed, written procedure for this). Some never really got the hang of it, which tended to shift more work on the Project Engineer. I remember one instance, where I had a Bryant mechanic working with me on a teardown, who failed to tag worn parts for repair (a mechanics responsibility). When we started to reassemble the machine, we had a panic situation to get these parts fixed.

It was only a few years after our Bryant purchase that Craig got us all together to announce that the company was discontinuing the 401(k) plan; for most of us this amounted to a 5% pay cut, not to mention our future retirement income. It was said that this was “temporary”, and would be reinstated as soon as possible. But most of us knew better.