Quote Originally Posted by Toolmaker51 View Post
Set reorganizing full scale production is usually a near cataclysmic event.
As was all too evident when a shop in South Ft. Worth that made Aviation and aerospace products For Lockheed International found out. It seems the company had been manufacturing the same exact A,B,C,D,E,F,G, products for over 20 years when one day at the stroke of the pen every item they had been making was deemed obsolete product A now needed to be A+h, B had to become B-f so on and so forth. Their production rans ran 6 months at a time when the change came down they were 1 month into production with raw materials for the full production run already in house. This wasn't going to be a simple tooling change either all of their fixtures molds, punches, dies, and jigs would have to be upgraded, modified or scrapped. All this while the company was expected to fulfill the original contract but with the updated parts or face stiff penalties for non-delivery. I think for about a month, just about every small and large job shop in the DFW area who had the capability and were willing to have government watch dogs looking over their shoulders were making something for them. We didn't make anything for them for one reason I didn't feel we had the capabilities with our older machines we only had 1 machinist other than myself and Jane at the time and I knew I wouldn't be able to put up with a shoulder ornament and wasn't about to ask Jane to either so that only left David.