People who tour our factory almost always comment on the brute elegance of the lathes and mills we use to build our frames. It’s a hodge-podge of heavy equipment drawn from old brick buildings like ours all over New England. Many of these machines have been working at their daily tasks for more than 50 years.
Skip Brown, who builds all our specialized fixturing, also maintains our fleet of behemoths. He shows up with the sun each morning and makes his rounds, oiling, aligning and cleaning. Skip says he can smell a well-cared for machine, just from the freshness of the oil scent wafting above it.
Bardons & Oliver cut-off lathe
Our cut-off lathe, an olive drab monster that sits at the edge of the machining area, was made in Cleveland, where Bardons & Oliver are still making manufacturing equipment. This one came from a barn out in Franklin, MA in 1998, the first machine we bought when we moved to our Watertown factory. We brought it home on a flatbed truck.