I believe it was in September of 2012 that I received a letter from Craig saying that they could no longer function using me as a “part time” engineer, and they wished me well in my retirement. The wife and I had been on vacation and the letter was in the mail when I got home. I was quite upset, as I thought this was a cowardly way of rewarding me for 21 years of service. Of course, they never hired a full time engineer to replace me, they just limped along for the next couple of years, until 2015 when they declared bankruptcy (actually, I think the bank foreclosed on them). The last machine tool builder in the valley. In the end, Landis Grinder bought the Bryant product line and moved everything to Maryland. As far as the rebuild business went, that was slowly being phased out during the Bryant buildup anyway. The auction that the bank conducted cleared everything out of the building; it is now owned by Springfield GMC, and is used to clean and prep new and used cars for sale.

In conclusion, it has been quite an adventure doing these write-ups, and I hope everyone has enjoyed reading them. This project was the result of a group of retired J&L engineers sitting down at the Harpoon Brewery in the summer of 2014 (like many worthwhile projects, beer WAS involved!!). The initial thought was to write down just how J&L was structured, how the various departments interacted with each other, and our various personal adventures / tribulations over the years, both serious and humorous. Although not earth shattering, these essays will allow future generations to get a glimpse of how it was during the Machine Tool Heydays of the 60’s and 70’s. I have been told that it was pretty much the same in the other shops.

Many people contributed to these essays, and I would like to take the time now to thank them. I decided to continue to write about my experiences after J&L closed, as I was lucky enough to be able to continue working in my field as a design engineer, mostly in the Springfield area, except for two years in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Because I only worked at each of these later companies for a couple of years after J&L, my knowledge of their processes was not as in-depth as it was at J&L. But I tried to outline their histories as well. They are all gone now, even New Jersey Machine, which was bought up by a Canadian firm.

There are, I’m sure, many more stories out there, and I may be back occasionally with another essay or two.  I need to do some research in a few areas first. I hope to write some in-depth stories about the effort to unionize the J&L office staff (by the United Steelworkers, I think). This led to the establishment of an in-house negotiation committee, to try to get some office improvements made and head off the unionization push (many of us were NOT pro-union). In the end the union drive failed, but my memory is fuzzy in the details.

As our sales continued to drop, the inevitability of furloughs hit a lot of us, me included. I had been on furlough for several months when, approaching my 63rd year, I decided to apply for Social Security. This was in the spring of 2008. After I started to receive my checks, I was called back to work; because I was now on Social Security, there was a limit as to how much I could earn each year without affecting my S.S. check. The company wanted me back full time, but I decided that could not happen. I wanted to enjoy my “retirement”, so we settled on a three day work week. It might have not been an ideal setup as far as the company went, but we made it work.

There had been many significant changes made while I was on furlough; because our expenses were outpacing our income, management decided they would no longer contract for rubbish removal (we had a dumpster in the rear parking lot). The foreman was put in charge of garbage disposal. He would assign various mechanics to truck our refuse to the recycle center. It is amazing just how much trash a small company like ours generates. And it is labor intensive to run our own garbage in the back of a pickup truck. If anything, I am willing to bet it cost us more in the long run to do this. Another item that was discontinued was the shop rag service. most shops in the valley would contract for cloth shop rags, the dirty ones which were turned in every Friday for laundering. Having clean shop rags was a very important part of building machinery; clean rags were vital for wiping down parts AND the mechanics hands. But it was announced that each mechanic could “supply their own rags” . A ridiculous idea, as these varied in quality from old towels to denim to skivvies. The third blow was the announcement that the company would no longer provide uniforms to the mechanics; wear whatever you wanted, and it was up to each individual to wash these grease and oil stained garments at home. I’m sure the wives loved this…………

It had become plain to see that The Company was struggling. During the last several years we had not seen any sort of a pay increase; the annual “merit reviews” were discontinued; everything revolved around production and shipping to maximize our income. Any cost cutting idea was evaluated and implemented. We laid off people; some left of their own accord, as they found employment elsewhere or saw the writing on the wall. I was fortunate during all of this, as I had already eased out of full time work, and had adjusted to the smaller paycheck.

Working part time had some downsides to it, though. I was not kept in the loop as to the daily developments, which affected my job as the Fluid Power Guy. There was an ongoing project to change significantly the design of various Bryant machine parts, including wheelheads and slides. A lot of these changes were questionable, done in the context of “research”. We did not have sufficient engineering knowledge to accomplish much of this successfully. These changes wreaked havoc on the supporting fluid power items that I  had ordered.

As we moved forward, and everyone became more familiar with the New System, things seemed to smooth out somewhat, although sales of the Bryant product were not encouraging. At this point we were concentrating on new machine build, and did not actively pursue machine rebuilding projects. Our core strength was being abandoned in favor of becoming an “OEM”. It seemed that each new machine order we did get was different than the last; we were continually spending money to redesign items that should have been fine just as they were. I was put in charge of the “Fluid Power” portion of the machine, which encompassed hydraulic systems, pneumatics, coolant and lubrication. I was no longer a “Project Engineer”, as we were now building new Bryant grinders….(sort of).

Purchasing was now in charge of selecting our vendors, which took quite a burden off  Engineering.  The contacts that we had established served us well; there had been a listing of vendors and their talents that could be used by the purchasing function in the future. As time went on, this list did change; some vendors disappeared, some new ones replaced them. Reasons varied, sometimes a change of ownership (and priorities). And of course some businesses disappeared, due to various reasons (retirement, etc.). But our core suppliers were with us until the end……….

One of our major vendors was Lovejoy Tool, right here in town. We had a good relationship going, and they had the capability of being able to make quite a lot of our “stuff”. They had the only CMM in the valley (Coordinate Measuring Machine), and this was quite valuable for being able to inspect some of our more intricate parts. Because they were not in the machine building business, they fared better when the other shops started to decline. Their main business was the design and build of cutting tools (milling cutters mostly). They are now the only cutting tool related business in town.

A brief history of Lovejoy Tool seems to be in order: the other major shops in town (Bryant and Fellows) were spin-offs of J&L, and so was Lovejoy. Fred Lovejoy started work as an engineer at J&L. He conceived the idea of an inserted-blade boring bar (up until this time, the blade was brazed on). This would allow quick blade changes when the cutting edge became dull. He applied this same thinking to milling cutters, and around 1916 he received a patent for his work. James T. Hartness, president of J&L at the time, encouraged Fred to organize a separate company to build these tools. The location of this enterprise was the original J&L building across from the Post Office (now the Senior Center). Over the years additions were added to accommodate the growing firm. So they have not moved very far from their “roots”. Of course their product line is now very large, including many different types of milling cutters, arbors and flywheels; the inserts range from the standby high speed steels, to state-of-the-art carbides and cast steel alloys. They also have a small “contract machining” function, in effect making parts for other outside companies (like us).

It seemed that after the Bryant acquisition in 2002, our forward momentum slowed over time. The task of organizing all the various parts of the product line overwhelmed us. The Project Engineer was required to follow the new MRP computer system when building the various Bills of Material; any new item on this document had to have its own unique part number entered into the Master List. To complicate things further, if any mistakes were made entering these numbers (I.E. a misplaced or missing digit), another entry would have to be made with the correct number. The incorrect / wrong number could not be deleted, and this one fact would cause us all kinds of problems down the road.

A short discussion concerning items on our Bills of Material: in our very early meetings on how to list various items on these  lists, it was decided to:                                  1). Continue to use our in-house part numbering system for manufactured parts (“VR” numbers); for the most part, these items would have an actual drawing or spec sheet with any necessary information for manufacture.                                                                     2). Use manufacturers part numbers for purchased items such as seals, bearings, etc., and enter these numbers directly into the MRP database without any supporting drawings.                                                                                                                                                 3). Integrate all the existing Bryant part numbers for manufactured parts into the system.

It did not take long to see just what kind of a mess we were getting into.                        1). Our in-house numbers would be no problem, as they were unique to us.                      2). The manufacturers part numbers would be tricky to use if we were not careful in entering them into the system. A lot of these numbers were very long.                                3). The Bryant numbers would be, for the most part, no problem.

Writing all the various Bills of Material for each order was usually done by the assigned Project Engineer. A complete machine build document might include 30 or 40 BOM’s. If there were any items that were “Long Lead” (those that had a long delivery time), the Project Engineer would release a “Preliminary” BOM to quickly get these items on order. This BOM would undergo numerous updates as the project advanced. Our periodic meetings would, hopefully, point out any problems that had to be addressed to keep the project on time.

The Shop Foreman had oversight on which mechanics were working on each project, and he would usually attend our meetings. There were always interruptions on the assembly floor to the schedule, sometimes they were legitimate (as sending a mechanic for a service call), sometimes at the whim of management (as when snap decisions were made and Management failed to tell the Foreman). The mechanics were caught in the middle on these occasions.

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.

Something had to be done to accommodate all the necessary computer equipment needed after our Bryant purchase. At this time engineering was still upstairs looking out over the Black River and the dam / falls. Management decided that we should move downstairs to be closer to the assembly area. But to do that required some removing and replacing of walls and doors. The downstairs office area consisted of Craig’s office, a quoting office, the senior engineers office (Ed Becker), and the girls who greeted visitors and did the necessary paperwork any business is involved in. The first order of business was to build a reception room closer to the main entrance and move the ladies out there; then serious wall removal and replacement would be possible. The company purchased several used work cubicles with flat work surfaces and five foot high walls. These were placed to create eight individual work areas for the engineering staff down stairs. After we were moved down, the upstairs area was revamped to create an office for Craig, looking out over the river; a sales office manned by our roving (sometimes) salesman; a separate purchasing department office; and an Operations Managers office at the top of the stairs.

There was a large room upstairs that had been used as a “catchall”, where various items from past projects had been stored. Most of this stuff was not really very valuable, but because we had the room, it accumulated. But we needed some space to set up a shop office where the MRP computer system would be used to track all necessary items to build any machine. Our acquisition of the Bryant product line required this, and it would lead us into ever more complex procedures down the road. MRP stands for Material Readiness Plan, a computer program, and it is suppose to allow us to plan future parts purchases so we can build machines more efficiently. The MRP manager would be seated in this newly refurbished area (the old “catchall” room); but also in there would be some purchasing and spare parts salespeople. Walls were painted, drop ceilings were installed, air conditioners were placed in the windows for the summer season (as it could be quite a hot area).

Up to this point all engineering BOM’s (Bills of Material) were hand written, and were distributed by engineering by hand. The new MRP system required computer generated BOM’s, with each item having it’s own specific part number (including fasteners and hardware). The BOM’s would still be generated from engineering, but each part needed a dedicated number, which had to be inserted into the MRP database for future use. It didn’t take long to see just what kind of errors could (and did) occur; most anyone could generate a part number, engineering, purchasing, management, and place it in the database. The MRP system that we bought did NOT allow changes or erasures once these numbers were entered, so an inserted wrong number Was Forever. There was no standard procedural guide written for part numbers to be reviewed before being entered into the database. Everyone had their own ideas as to how it should be done………

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.

It was right around the time we were building the small ex-Heald grinder that Craig decided to change the name of the company. His future plans were to build new machinery, so our “Vermont Rebuild” name had to go. It took a while for management to come up with a new one, and when the name “Vermont Machine Tool” was announced, most of us shuddered. Wasn’t that what The Goldman Group called themselves? Well, it was VERY similar; wouldn’t there be some confusion here? Our qualms were not eased when Craig put up a big sign on the side of the building. It’s still there, and will probably stay (oh, BTW, Goldman called themselves “Vermont USA Machine Tool Group).

The dream of becoming an “OEM” was realized when we bought the Bryant product line out of bankruptcy. The Goldman Group had filed for bankruptcy protection early in 2002, and it included all their holdings in Vermont, including J&L, Fellows, and Bryant. Our decision to buy Bryant was based on the fact that they had still posted a profit into the late ’90’s. Unfortunately, in 2000 Goldman had decided to move the complete company from their original building on Clinton Street up to the Fellows complex in North Springfield. On the face of it, it made sense; put everything under one roof. But the complexity and cost of the move proved fatal; within two years, the entire outfit folded.

We would never have been able to buy Bryant without some sort of financial help; the state of Vermont stepped up to advance the necessary money. This money was lent to the town of Springfield, who in return lent it to us. This loan was to be paid back to the town, and half of the money would be returned to the state; the other half the town would retain in a “revolving loan” fund which could be lent to other needy businesses.

What we got for our money was the complete Bryant product line, including any and all inventory of parts, patterns, and in-process machine builds. Also the “Intellectual Property”, which included all drawings, and microfilms of drawings, manuals, service reports, customer contacts and patents. We had a problem- where were we going to put all this “stuff”? We ended up renting a large area on the ground floor of the old Fellows building, where we constructed a fenced-in area to organize all the physical parts inventory. It was quite a large project that took many months to complete. We had to build shelving and tag all the items with proper part numbers, and make a master list of just where all these items were located. Of course, we had to hire more help, and were lucky enough to be able to retain some former Bryant people who were familiar with their numbering system, mechanics to build the machinery, and office help to organize the drawings and spare parts inventory.

 

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.

The Fellows cold forming machines were originally built in the 1960’s. They were set up and run off in the old foundry building on the corner of Clinton and Bridge Street. This building is still there, but I don’t think its used for anything now. When we got involved with rebuilding this machine, there was talk about setting it up and running it off there, because the anchor points were still in the floor. But there was no electricity or water available. So we set it up in our building on Pearl Street.

The machine itself was composed of three main sections; the infeed unit, the main forging head, and the backpressure unit. These arrived at our plant on two large flatbed trucks. After they backed into our building, we proceeded to unload each unit. Our main bridge crane could easily handle both the infeed and backpressure sections, but was really straining to handle the main forging head. I don’t think that crane was ever up to par after that. It was discovered that the (customer) estimated weights of these pieces was nowhere near what they actually weighed. The forging head consisted of a cast steel housing that ended up weighing ten thousand pounds without any of the components inside. Of course, it was fully assembled when we unloaded it. We ended up having to hire a travelling crane from Miller Construction in Windsor to move it around inside our building. We quite often used their services to handle large machinery.

I believe this machine design could be traced back to WW2 Germany. There were a couple of European engineers on the Fellows payroll who brought this product on board. It was really quite a piece of design work. The main motor was rated at 125 HP, and when we finally got the machine reassembled and pushed the “start” button, we smoked the power transformer on the outside pole! We had never handled anything of this size before. My contact at Winchester said we shouldn’t have to worry about going to Purgatory, as working on this machine was the equivalent. I tended to agree, it was one big, bad tough machine to work on.

The main forging head consisted of a large “bull” gear, probably 4 feet in diameter, which turned four equally spaced planetary gears. These planetary gears each turned a spindle which moved the forging hammer blocks thru eccentrics. There was a separate system that was powered by its own motor, that moved four wedge assemblies to bring the forging hammer block energy to the main forging dies (where the actual metal hammering took place). All of these parts were massive; the spherical roller bearings on the spindles were probably 18 inches in diameter. We had to lay the forging head casting on its back to disassemble and reassemble it. We had it placed on large 8 x 8 wooden blocks so we could crawl underneath it. That took getting used to……..