Posted on 04/05/2024 6:57:41 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Tools that were used in the GE tool shops in Schenectady in the first half of the 20th century, whoever manufactured them.
BTW my first job in the machine tool industry had me rebuilding and installing some large gantry mills at Fairchild Republic for making A-10 wing skins. My last big project had me at Lockheed Fort Worth, installing a huge CMM for gaging the F-35 skins. While I was there I watched crews removing four (or was it six?) Cincinnati Milacron gantry mills that had made thousands of F-16 parts. Milling of F-35 frames and landing gears and such were being subcontracted out, I guess, and the skins are carbon fiber, with minimal machining being done on a German 5-axis machine. My CMM was also German. No American company could come close to building one that big.
I was in and out of Schenectady a few times. You would have seen Bullards, Giddings & Lewis, Lucas, Kearney & Trecker, Monarch, American, Sundstrand, Lodge & Shipley, deVlieg, and not a single foreign-made machine of any kind until the late ‘80s. By then the American industry was all but dead, and GE was buying German. My rep there made a fortune on one order for about a dozen big German machining centers at nearly half a million apiece.
A friend ran a local private machine shop with machines all bought from GE - they were amazing old machines that worked great.
It was a better world when engineers ran companies.
They built a few locomotives in Schenectady as well.
https://www.schenectadyhistory.org/railroads/alcocovers/
Somebody keeps buying the Boeing (BA) stock of almost no value other than what the machinery might get at auction.
When I was there Schenectady was shrinking fast. Over half the buildings had been bulldozed to save on taxes. What it must be now....40 years later.
If you pay the tax to the DEI gods or the ESG gods and use coded language with your workforce, it absolves you of the hard work of really leading.
From one of the brightest cities to one of the worst. The Dems put a casino on the Mohawk River but that alone is insufficient to resurrect Schenectady. Urban blight, crime, typical Democrat led city.
Boeing’s Downfall - Before the McDonnell Douglas Merger
“Boeing today seems to be going from crisis to crisis, with its reputation in tatters and the press and much of the public reacting any time something happens to a Boeing aircraft – even if one of the pilots just SNEEZES wrongly.
But HOW or WHY did we get here? How did Boeing, a gem of a company, that was once the Gold Standard of aviation engineering, end up with their name getting dragged through the mud this way? And more specifically, what role did Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas have, in making this happen?
Today I’m starting a series on… Boeing’s fall from grace. And in this episode, I will set the stage by taking a look at the history of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, to show how different these giants were, as they headed to a “wedding” that many now wish had never happened.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym41Iz68j4s
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