| Navigating ‘this mess’ of an economy | ||
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jeff roth, founder of chasco machine & manufacturing, Port Richey, Fla., described current economic conditions as “this mess.” He said his accountant told him, “If you end up breaking even this year, you’ll be a winner.” Chasco will do much better than
that, but not without significant effort and continued application of advanced machine
tool technology. Roth, a 20-year veteran of the machine shop business, formed Chasco in 2000. The company services the aerospace, energy and other industries, machining parts as small as 1/8" in diameter and as large as 6" to 10" in diameter to tolerances of 0.0005" and tighter. Most parts are made from 4340 steel and aluminum; lot sizes are generally 100 to 250 pieces but can be as large as 50,000. “We try to get the customer to give us their annual usages; then we can run them in a Kanban system,” Roth said. “That gives us the flexibility to keep our machines running all the time.” Roth said the economic slowdown hit his operation suddenly and was compounded by the mechanics strike at Boeing, which buys products from Chasco’s customers. Before that happened, “We had such a boom it was like heroin. I knew in the back of my head it wasn’t going to last forever, though.” In February 2008 the shop shipped about $350,000 worth of products to five different customers; this past February it shipped about $210,000.
The one thing that “saved our butt” amidst the economic turmoil, Roth said, was the shop’s machine tools. Chasco has Elite multispindle lathes from Eurotech, Brooksville, Fla.; Tsugami Swiss-style automatic lathes imported by REM Sales, Windsor, Conn.; and is adding Lico CNC turning centers, supplied by Eurotech. A Fanuc robot permits untended operation. The multispindle machines enable Chasco to use one machine to produce parts that otherwise would require secondary operations, and the robot permits low-cost, untended work. The shop’s newest Eurotech machine features a subspindle and has Y-axis capability on both of its twin turrets. “We have a customer coming in for a steel carrier for the AR-15 rifle. It’s 1,000 pieces a month, and the new machine is perfect for it,” Roth said. “We can take that part and run it complete on our lathe and be milling on two sides at the same time. Then we are going to send it out for heat treat; instead of grinding the 0.001" tolerance on the OD after heat treat, we are going to hard turn it in our Eurotech with the robot on it.” Roth noted that current economic conditions make it hard for shops to step up to new technology. “Let’s say a guy has four or five people in his shop, a common small shop,” he said. “They don’t set the world on fire, the payroll is decent. If they buy a 2-axis lathe and a little milling center with an indexer, they are not going to be competitive. But if they want to get a $350,000 machine they are going to have a hard time getting someone to lease that to them. The banks have got to look at this differently. This is where, I hate to say this, the government has to get involved with backing some of these leases. It doesn’t help us to hire more people in this trade if we’re not competitive. That’s gotta change.” |
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| —B. Kennedy | ||
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