Rebuilding with VMCs: People & Companies

Machine shops are like families and communities. When tragedy strikes, everyone pulls together, picks up the pieces and starts putting lives and livelihoods back together. This was the case in August 2018 for T.D.C. Engineering Inc. in Campbellsport, Wisconsin, when an EF1 tornado, which has wind speeds from 138 to 177 kph (86 to 110 mph), that was the width of a football field ripped through the shop. Eighteen additional tornadoes hit the state the same day.

Luckily for owner Tim Grahl and his 10 employees, all but one of them had gone home for the day, and the remaining worker was able to shelter in the bathroom — the only part of the building left standing. T.D.C. Engineering’s lathes, wire and sinker electrical discharge machines, surface grinders, tooling, fixtures and six machining centers were all gone. Two small machines initially were considered salvageable, but he said they ultimately were scrapped along with the rest.

However, he looks on the sunny side.

“It was bad,” Grahl said, “but it could have been much worse. We were quite fortunate.”

The shop moved to a temporary facility near Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, while the building was rebuilt. Because of the smaller size of the makeshift location, T.D.C. Engineering was able to replace only half its machine tools, and the machining centers weren’t from the same builder as the previous ones.

“There were some nice things about the original machines,” Grahl said. “But ever since the builder went out of business and then changed hands several times, the brand has gone downhill. We actually updated three of our machines a few years ago but didn’t like their new control at all. They should have just stuck with what they had.”

A tornado destroyed T.D.C. Engineering’s machine shop. T.D.C. Engineering’s new facility (left) has six Kent Industrial USA VMCs. Image courtesy of T.D.C. Engineering

As a job shop, T.D.C. Engineering machines a variety of parts, such as valve bodies, metering pins, shafts and sprockets, from various materials, including steel, stainless steel, aluminum and plastic, and needs CNC machines to suit the diversity. The mix of work includes parts for Mercury Marine, tooling for Kohler Co. and large components for several Texas customers that perform offshore oil exploration.

Instead of sticking with the familiar, Grahl heeded the advice of Jeff Luth, owner of Luth Machinery Sales LLC in Campbellsport, and purchased two new vertical machining centers built by Tustin, California-based Kent Industrial USA Inc.

As many machinists could attest, changing to a new brand of CNC equipment with a different control can be challenging. Everything is unfamiliar, with a host of screens to navigate, commands to master and functions to learn. Assuming that a shop has a decent CNC system and a properly written post-processor, the programming changes aren’t that difficult to handle. But few shops willingly would give up the machine tool brand they’ve built a business on for an unknown.